
GassJi^_X_ 



10 



COPYRIGHT DEFGSJcT; 



THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 



The Religion of the Tommy 



War Essays and Addresses 



By 
H. P. ALMON ABBOTT, M.A, D.D. 

Dean of Trinity Cathedral 
Cleveland 



Morehouse Publishing Co. 

Milwaukee 
1918 






COPYRIGHT BY THE 

MOREHOUSE PUBLISHING CO. 
1918 






NOV -6 1918 \<" 

©CI.A5U8073 



INDEX 

The Religion of the Tommy 1 

The Call op Europe 13 

Faith and the War ......... 22 

Combatant and Non-Combatant 40 

The Church and the Reconstruction Period . 53 

The Cloud of the War, and the Silver Lining 64 

Easter and the War 69 

Women and the War 79 

A Woman War Worker 84 

Great Britain's Effort . 88 

A Visit to F . . 98 

A Visit to S Camp 105 

A Visit to W Camp 119 

A Visit to A . . Camp . . - . . . • 129 

A Visit to Oxford 140 



TO 

The Cherished Memory 

of 

My Mother 

In Deepest Gratitude and Abiding Love 

I Dedicate This Book 



THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

THERE could be no more important matter 
of discussion for the Christian Church 
at the present time than the Religion of the 
Tommy. Somehow or other the Church must 
adapt herself to the religious outlook of the 
men who are actively engaged in this war, in 
order that when this war is over the Church 
may have a message and a programme, a vital 
message and an attractive programme, for the 
manhood of the nations. The Reconstruction 
Period lies before us, either in the immediate or 
the less immediate future, and the Church, 
together with all the departmentalized activi- 
ties of society in general, must walk with firin 
step and seeing eyes into the maze of assured 
uncertainties. 

The Constructor, or the Reconstructor, 
whether individual or organizational, must 
have some plan in mind, some more or less 
defined propaganda in view, if he would expect 
to accomplish results at all commensurate with 
the opportunities at his disposal. Atmospheric 
intention — praiseworthy as such atmospheric 



2 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

intention may happen to be in its spirit — is not 
enough. It is essential that there should be a 
measure of definiteness in expectation, and so 
in procedure. 

The Religion of the Tommy ! It is a difficult 
subject; it abounds in seeming paradox and in 
apparent contradiction; but it is a subject 
which must be considered, and even unfounded 
conclusions are better than no conclusions at 
all — as indicative of awakening interest, and as 
provocative of searching interrogation. 

The Religion of the Tommy is, of course, 
the Religion of the average man ; for Tommy 
is not a professionalized soldier — he is neither 
more nor less than the civilian in khaki. He is 
the ordinary man in the throes of a temporary 
"job" ; a "job" which he is engaged in for the 
moment because he considers it to be the 
bounden and the necessary thing to do; but a 
"job" which he fully intends to lay aside, and 
to lay aside for all time, so soon as the cir- 
cumstances of world politics permit of such 
relinquishment. 

It is necessary to bear this fact in mind, for 
its realization enlarges the discussion so far as 
the Church is concerned to the circumferences 
of the entire male constituency, or possible 
male constituency, of the Church, rather than 
to the soldier in particular. 

The Religion of the Tommy is, then, the 
Religion of the average man. To formulate 



THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 3 

the one is to formulate the other, and if the 
Church proves herself wise enough to scheme 
the reception of the former she will also, at 
the same time, scheme the reception of the 
latter. 

What, then, is the Religion of the Tommy? 
In a sense, and that the accredited conventional 
sense, the Tommy has no Religion at all. That 
is to say — and one would avoid misconception 
in this connection — the Tommy is not a be- 
liever in Institutionalized Religion. He is alto- 
gether undoctrinal in his Religion, and he has 
no patience with, and less appreciation of, 
Theology — as we understand that all inclusive 
term. 

In Tommy's estimation the Church is sus- 
pect. The Church is suspect for many reasons 
— among them the following : Tommy has no 
admiration for the man who is playing safe. 
He is not playing for safety himself — far from 
it, for he is risking his health and his life at 
every turn — and he has no regard for the man 
who is playing for safety in matters eternal ; 
who is preeminently interested in the salvation 
of his own individual soul. It seems to 
Tommy that the Church is literally thronged 
with people who are running for shelter from 
the barrage of Satan, and who are desirous 
above all else of saving their spiritual skins 
from unpleasing perforations. 

Tommy is, of course, less than right here. 



4 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

As a matter of fact, organized Christianity has 
been largely diluted of its individualism in 
recent years, and the social note has begun to 
be emphasized in no uncertain tones. The 
truth is, however, that Tommy is laboring 
under the impression that most people go to 
Church, and associate themselves with the 
Church's life, because they are afraid that 
otherwise they might not be assured of their 
safe passage to the Eternal Blighty. 

I have seen soldiers come into a Hut Canteen 
during the progress of a religious service, walk 
stolidly over to the newspapers hanging upon 
the customary screen, and stand there brazenly 
reading, with hats on and the inevitable ciga- 
rette in their mouths, throughout the course of 
the entire proceedings. I admired them for it. 
They had their convictions, and they were 
honest enough to live up to them. At the 
bottom of their behavior there was the per- 
meating thought, "These fellows may be scared 
about the welfare of their souls ; but I am not 
scared about the welfare of mine. Let me do 
my piece of work, and salvation will take 
care of itself." 

Then, Tommy has been through an experi- 
ence which has changed his ideas as to the 
relative merits of the professing and the non- 
professing Christian. He has found it im- 
possible to distinguish between the ordinarily 
religious man and the ordinarily unreligious 



THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 5 

man in the hour of crisis. As an illustration 
of what I mean, in one platoon there was a 
cosmopolitanism of membership which would 
do justice to the proportioned cosmopolitan- 
ism of an American city. There were — 
amongst the totaled number — two professional 
thieves, a bank clerk, a lawyer, a saloon keeper, 
and a divinity student. One day three vol- 
unteers were called for to undertake a piece 
of work fraught with exceptional danger. 
Who responded? Why, the two thieves and 
the saloon keeper! I do not suggest for a 
moment that the bank clerk, the lawyer, and 
the divinity student would not have responded 
as well — I like bank clerks and lawyers and 
divinity students — but the fact remains that 
they did not respond quickly enough. The 
thieves and the saloon keeper got ahead of 
them ! Now, such things as this, and they are 
happening every day, make Tommy think. He 
is far! from being sure that Church affiliation, 
or even a reputation for morality, differentiate 
his brothers in the quality of inherent manli- 
ness. He finds that when put to the test, "A 
man's a man for a' that." 

In this connection Tommy is rather under 
the impression that the Church turns out the 
goody-goody young man, and the prig. In 
other words that the atmosphere of the Church 
is harmful to the production of robust charac- 
ter. He may be wrong, and I believe that he 



6 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

is wrong; but Tommy is a crass person, an 
unconscious pragmatist in every sense of the 
word ; he judges men as he finds them ; and he 
has come to the conclusion that the man who is 
forever talking about his soul, and his brother's 
soul, and the life of the world to come, is 
not altogether to be trusted. He has sensed 
the fact, and through flagrant illustration, that 
these men do not always fortify their profession 
by their deeds, and he is illogical enough to 
be logically prejudiced against an Institution 
which harbors hypocrites within its fold. 

Yes, rightly or wrongly, the Church is sus- 
pect in Tommy's eyes, and so his Religion is 
— whatever it may be — of a different brand 
from the conventional and conventionalized 
Religion of the Church. It follows from this 
— and I have already hinted at the fact — that 
there is no Theology in Tommy's Religion. 
He is, for example, strong on works, his acts 
are often times religious to a pronounced de- 
gree ; but he has no conception of Justification 
by Faith. He repudiates, and with a fervor 
of masculine honesty, the suggestion that the 
sufferings of Christ were a substitution for His 
own sinfulness. He tells you, and with a 
courage of selfhood which wins your latent 
admiration, that he does not want anyone, God 
or man, to stand between him and the conse- 
quences of his misdeeds. He is man enough 
to take his own punishment when punishment 



THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 7 

is due, and he would consider it an im- 
poverishment of his self-respect to permit 
anyone else to pay the price for him. 

As to his conception of the Person of Christ 
— well — he has, I believe, no intelligent concep- 
tion in the matter ; but of this much he is fully 
persuaded: that Christ was not a man in the 
sense in which Tommy Atkins is a man ; that 
He did not have to face life with the limited 
kit with which he has to face life ; and that for 
all occasions calling for extraordinary self- 
control Christ had something "up His sleeve." 
This is, of course, an unconscious testimony 
to the Deity of the Master; but it removes 
Christ from the similitude of a militant ex- 
ample, or pattern, of conduct. No, Tommy 
has — in common parlance — "no use" for The- 
ology; for the niceties of theological distinc- 
tions; and if he must have the Gospel at all, 
then, let it be the Gospel untrammelled with 
the denned speculations of the schools. 

What, then, is Tommy's Religion? It is a 
vague Religion; in a large measure, an un- 
conscious Religion; an inarticulated code of 
feeling and behavior which leads him to think 
and to do noble things without fully under*- 
standing the why and the wherefore of his 
thoughts and deeds. It seems, however, to 
center about the Golden Rule, "Do unto others 
as ye would that others should do unto you" 
— a hopelessly incomplete formula of behavior 



8 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

so far as God is concerned, and yet, when all 
is said and done, not a bad formula to follow 
out, in all its inferences and applications, in 
daily life. 

Tommy is living for his comrade, aye, and 
dying for his comrade — and without the slight- 
est display in the matter— every day. He is 
forever sacrificing himself for the other fellow, 
and, of course, he is gloriously surrendering 
his happiness and his mortal being for the 
comfort of his own country, and for the 
security of the world at large. 

The truth seems to be that Tommy is doing 
his bit in and for the moment. He is ener- 
getically forwarding the task at his feet, and 
he has little interest in, and less understanding 
of, the apparently minor matters of the soul. 
This world, and the things of this world, oc- 
cupy his whole concern, and in his leisure 
moments, which are few and far between, he 
has other things to think of than the "love- 
wooed dreams of the Land that is afar off." 

Such, then, negatively and affirmatively, is 
the Religion of the Tommy — of the English, 
aye, the American soldier of to-day; the Re- 
ligion of the civilian in khaki ; the Credo of the 
average man. 

:|c $ $ if. 3fC $ 

It may be that the foregoing seems un- 
satisfactory to the stay-at-home, who has been 
fondling the presumption that there is a mar- 



THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 9 

vellous Religious Revival being wrought 
through the agency of this present war, and 
that such revival was reaching its climax of 
ecstatic proportions among the rank and file 
of our fighting forces. 

If such be the case — two things must be 
borne in mind, and with emphasis unqualified. 
The first thing is this : The Church dare not 
say anything derogatory to the character, or 
the religious outlook, of the soldiers of to-day. 
These men are fighting our battles. These 
men are standing between us and the greatest 
disaster that has ever faced humanity in the 
history of the world. These men are playing 
the Twentieth Century Christos — laying down 
their lives that we may live — and through their 
vicarious sufferings we are freed, freed to carry 
on our avocations, and to die, in peace. Any 
hint of patronage on the part of the Church 
towards these men should be repudiated, and 
with withering scorn, by all right thinking 
people. 

The other thing is this. These men are — 
for the most part — young men. The clamor- 
ous blood of youth is shouting in their veins. 
They are engaged in a great adventure — the 
consummation of which possesses their minds 
to the relative insignificance of all else. Their 
faults — if any — are the faults of immaturity, 
and of absorbing occupation. Their virtues — 



10 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

and they are many — are the virtues of the doer, 
and not of the thinker, in every age. 



How may the Church in the Period of Re- 
construction, in the Peace Robed Years which 
lie before us, expect to enlist such men in her 
support, and to enroll them as professed fol- 
lowers of the King of kings? 

Candidly— I do not know. These men are 
for the most part so whole-souledly out of 
sympathy with the Church, as the Church is 
constituted at the present time, that an 
effective reconciliation between the Church and 
the average man would seem to partake of the 
stuff of which dreams are made. One would 
almost suggest a scrapping of the Church as 
the Church exists to-day; but such procedure 
would be faithlessness to the Deposit of Truth, 
and, at the same time, altogether beyond the 
boundaries of practical politics. 

All that one may do is to advocate certain 
changes of attitude which might, in practice 
and in time, induce the average man to throw 
in his lot with the Religion of the Church. 

(i) The Church must be as manly, and as 
masculine, as the man to whom she caters. 
She must permit a human latitude of behavior 
even whilst she adheres to a divine longitude 
of character. Little sins must not be magnified 



THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 11 

into big sins, and piety must be saturated with 
the breath of reason. 

(2) The Church must be honest. She has 
not always been honest in the past — either in 
her system, or in minor matters of procedure. 
She has inveigled men into her membership, 
and into attendance at her services, through 
means which have almost amounted to trickery. 
There has been a string attached to association 
with almost every Church society — from the 
Sunday school upwards. Men have looked on 
and seen these things, and they have thought 
"unutterables" which have caused them for- 
ever after to "pass by on the other side". 

(3) The Minister must be unworldly, and 
the Church constituency must "perform in their 
lives that which they profess with their lips." 
We must, all of us, "walk in wisdom — that is 
in sincerity — toward them that are without." 
Hypocrisy must — despite the human nature of 
us all — be reduced to the minimum. We must 
produce a character which is obviously better 
than characters produced elsewhere. 

(4) We must be real. This, it seems to me, 
is the prime necessity. If we are real — genuine 
in speech and deed— we shall ultimately appeal 
to the average man. Sincerity always "wins 
out" in the long run. Truthfulness is, by its 
very nature, irresistible. 

Finally — We must deprecate Theology, and 
magnify Religion. There must be definition 



12 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

in all things ; but let us see to it that we do not 
over-define the Gospel of Good News, nor play 
the Pettifogger with the Person of Jesus Christ. 
The average man is tired of formularies of 
Faith, and would find rest and peace for his 
soul in the profound simplicities. The day 
for Theology is past, and the day for Religion 
has come. The Church must be abreast of 
the times. 

Manliness — honesty — consistency of life — 
reality, and simplicity. There you have the 
recipe, and in broadest outline and ingredient, 
for the Church's appeal to the average man of 
the Post War Days of the future. 



THE CALL OF EUROPE 

I HAVE but recently returned from England, 
where I had the privilege of traveling some- 
what extensively, and of coming into contact 
with the military outlook; and I am able to 
assure you, from my own observation and from 
views expressed to me by authoritative people, 
that the advent of the United States into the 
War is heralded as the salvation of civilization, 
and as the surety of ultimate victory for the 
Allied Cause. This realization is so pro- 
nounced that it would be altogether impossible 
to overemphasize the esteem in which America, 
and the American executive, are held in 
England to-day. The attitude is that of a 
beleaguered city, hard pressed by the encom- 
passing hosts of its enemies, accepting the 
information that an unconquerable army is 
marching to its relief with the keenest ex- 
pressions of delight, and every outward evi- 
dence of unrestrained joy. 

England — and I restrict myself primarily to 
England, that I may speak whereof I know — 
has lost the first flush of her enthusiasm, the 



14 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

original idealism of the great undertaking on 
behalf of humanity, and has settled down to the 
prosecution of the War as a beastly business 
which must be seen through, with clenched 
hand and gritted teeth, at all costs. There are 
three stages in any protracted War — the onset, 
the grip, and the drag. England is involved in 
the drag; in the long continued pull with an 
adversary of seemingly unlimited resource ; and 
the knowledge that the greatest republic in the 
world has entered as a fresh young Giant into 
the arena of hostilities has fostered a hearten- 
ment in the struggle which, altogether inex- 
pressible in words, has permeated the very fibre 
of the national life. The armies on the various 
Fronts, the navy in its ceaseless task of heroic 
vigilance, and the population in the Home- 
land, have taken, as it were, a deep breath 
of invigorating healthfulness, and, with cour- 
age refreshed, have rededicated themselves 
to the thorn-crowned service of liberty and 
democracy. 

This has been, so far, and apart from financial 
assistance, the greatest and the most imme- 
diate effect of America's participation in the 
conflict. I saw it illustrated, and in small focus 
which prepared the way for a larger realization, 
on shipboard. In crossing over to England we 
had with us in the first cabin two hundred and 
fifty American officers of all ranks, and one 
solitary British officer, a major, who had been 



THE CALL OF EUROPE 15 

through the War from the historic battle of the 
Marne, and who, shell shocked and physically 
disorganized, was returning to his unit after a 
trip abroad for his health. The American offi- 
cers were, taken as a whole, the most magnifi- 
cent body of men that I have ever been priv- 
ileged to meet — university graduates who had 
just finished their intensive training in southern 
and northern camps ; sound of wind and limb ; 
heart whole and soul proof; and possessed of a 
spiritualized conception of the crusade in which 
they were shortly to be engaged. They were 
young knights, and modest-minded young 
knights at that, sworn to the relief of the op- 
pressed, and to the emancipation of humanity 
from the throes of a threatened slavery. The 
British officer, on the other hand, was a war- 
hardened man. His eyes were literally haunted 
with the untoward sights which he had wit- 
nessed during the past few years, and his speech 
— when he could be induced to speak, for these 
War veterans are the most silent of mortals — ■ 
was the speech of a man who has lost the pro- 
portionated vision through attention to the 
details of the immediate task. He was at war 
because his Country was at war ; he was fight- 
ing because his countrymen were fighting; and 
beyond the recognition that the Germans must 
be defeated, whether in long time or in short 
time, and whatever the cost in blood or treas- 
ure, there was no apocalyptic incentive of a 



16 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth 
righteousness. He was in the drag of war's 
experience whilst his shipmates were in the 
enamored and the enamoring glow of the onset 
of war's alarm. It was enlightening as the days 
went on to see how the enthusiasm and the 
idealism of the Americans gradually awakened 
the Englishman to newness of life; how the 
memory of the muddiness and the bloodiness 
and the sordidness of active service was all shot 
through with a rain-bowed hope of better 
things, of lastingly better things, for Europe 
and the world. The man was new born to a 
belief in the innate worthwhileness of human 
nature; his brooding cynicism of soul was 
stilled ; and his spirit, his entire higher nature, 
was regenerated to God. 

This, it seems to me, even more than material 
assistance, even more than the mere count in 
aeroplanes, or in men; even more than the 
financing of the War in generous billions by 
the most generous of all peoples, is America's 
mission, at any rate at the present time, to her 
allies Over Seas. She must keep alive, in the 
minds and hearts of men, the supreme purposes 
of the conflict which is rocking the hemis- 
pheres. She must be altruistic in her impulses, 
and God-endowed, self-consciously God-en- 
dowed, in her endeavors. She must fight, and 
with all the forces of sentiment at her com- 
mand, against a mechanistic view of War. She 



THE CALL OF EUROPE 17 

must bear aloft the Torch of Faith into the 
smoke and grime of contending armies, and 
shout aloud, so that Humanity may give heed 
and hear, the Battle Cry of God. 

The appeal of England to-day is "Come over 
and help us." "We are engulfed in the action 
and reaction of abnormal conditions. We are 
possessed of a dogged courage ; we are ready to 
walk through the uttermost reaches of this out- 
wardly imposed Inferno ; but we need, we need 
with a heart hunger which there is no gain- 
saying, your beautiful ideas, your sweet confi- 
dences, your intoxicating ideals, your unswerv- 
ing conviction that in the long run all things 
work together for good to them that love, and 
seek to pursue, the right. Assist us in quantity 
— both of equipment and men ; but, above and 
beyond all else, assist us in quality ; in degree, 
rather than in extent. Let your men be young 
Galahads, and see to it that your propaganda 
is fired with a passionate insistency of ethical 
pronouncement." 

Now, how may we expect to meet the re- 
quirements of the Call of Europe in this con- 
nection ? How may we play the role of spirit- 
ual helpmeet to our Allies who through the 
bearing of the burden and the heat of the day 
have almost reached the limits of spiritual ex- 
haustion? How may we keep alive the funda- 
mental principles of righteousness which have 



18 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

ushered the most humane of the nations of the 
earth into the blood-saturated maelstrom of 
man's unparalleled inhumanity to man ? 

We must, of course, do our uttermost to 
equip our young men who are about to go Over 
Seas with "the whole Armor of God" — the 
Girdle of Truth ; the Breastplate of Righteous- 
ness ; the Shield of Faith ; the Helmet of Hope ; 
and the Sword of the Spirit. This is to be done 
in America — not on the battlefields of Europe. 
It is, in a sense, an impertinence to preach 
religion to men on the firing line — especially 
when the preacher is a noncombatant and not 
worthy to unloose the shoes' latchets of the 
men whom he has the temerity to address. 
When the men "go over the top" they know 
more about God than the average preacher 
knows in a lifetime This spiritual equipping of 
our men is to be done in the churches and train- 
ing camps of the homeland, and it is to be so 
thoroughly accomplished that the indenture 
will endure the effacing of the graduated dis- 
illusionment which lies ahead. The reasons for 
America's entrance into the War ; the unselfish- 
ness of America's intentions; the achievement 
of the World Goal to which the horror of the 
War is only the means to an end ; the opposing 
principles of life which are responsible for the 
sight and experience of a World in Arms ; these 
things, ethical and humanitarian, all caught up 
into the religious motive of the conflict, with 



THE CALL OF EUROPE 19 

Jesus Christ as the alluring Champion of the 
whole, must be proclaimed in season and out 
of season until our brave lads are inoculated 
with the virus of the justice of the cause for 
which they fight. 

Then, we must do our uttermost to provide 
our young men with the opportunities of 
healthful recreation in France, or wherever 
their warring lot may happen to be cast. The 
distinguishing feature of the soldier's life in 
Europe to-day is monotony, a soul-benumbing 
and heart-deadening monotony, a monotony 
which literally floods the horizon of thought 
and activity to the verge of criminality, and 
beyond. 

The force of temptation to the man who for 
months on end has been subjected to the routi- 
nized horror of warfare, and who suddenly finds 
himself within the circle of polite civilization — 
adrift in a center of population far from home 
and restraining influences — is altogether be- 
yond the comprehension of the individual who 
is leading a more or less normal, and a 
sheltered, life. The point is, however, that we 
must sacrifice ourselves at home to provide for 
the safeguarding of the morals of the men who 
are fighting our battles Over Seas. As Amer- 
icans who are desirious of answering the Call of 
Europe for idealism we must see to it that our 
soldiers are so protected in the unusual circum- 
stances in which they find themselves placed 



20 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

that they may be able to preserve the vision of 
the Pure in Heart who see God, and to pass on 
that vision to their comrades of the Allied 
Nations. We must so surround our men with 
good inducements that evil inducements will 
lose their urgency of appeal, and that they will 
be sane enough to appreciate the fact that even 
if life is calculably short and death looms near 
it is the part of manliness and wisdom to play 
the game of decency until the game of decency 
is well played out. If we would have our young 
men, those boys of whom we are all so im- 
measurably proud, those youths with the light 
of self-sacrifice shining in their eyes, an inspira- 
tion, and an uplifting influence, to the soldiers 
of England and France and Italy, and all the 
rest; if we would delegate them as the repre- 
sentatives of America to carry the message 
of American consecration to the shores of 
Europe ; then we must envelope them with the 
tangible evidences of our ameliorative love, 
and support to the best of our ability such 
agencies as the Young Men's Christian Asso- 
ciation, and kindred organizations, which have 
the specialized ability to cater to the needs of 
the soldier on active service. 

Religion in the Home Land, and Social Ser- 
vice, with a modicum of religion, outside the 
Home Land — these are the common sense 
means to be employed in the formulation of 



THE CALL OF EUROPE 21 

America's sustained reply to the Cry of 
Europe, "Come over and help us." 



Whilst we are so praiseworthily engaged in 
the promotion of material assistance — assist- 
ance which is absolutely essential to the 
achievement of ultimate victory — assistance 
which the United States and the United States 
alone may give — do not let us forget the spiri- 
tual aspect of the matter, and withhold that 
assistance of thought and idea and ideal which 
is the fundamental requirement of the business 
in hand, and which ranks as the animating soul 
within the body of our sanctified exertions. 
Only so may we maintain that morale, that 
dauntless enthusiasm, that certainty of the 
eventual conquest of might by right, which 
the other nations associated with us in Arma- 
geddon have almost lost through their long- 
time contact with the hideousness of war. 



FAITH AND THE WAR 

THERE are those who in the face of the 
untoward conditions and the wholesale 
slaughter of the past four years have given up 
their belief in God — in God's existence, and in 
the benevolent attitude of God towards Man. 

There are those who, in accordance with their 
lights, have a right to deny God's existence 
and God's partiality on account of this War, 
and there are those who have no right to deny 
God's existence and God's partiality. There 
are those who are entitled to their disbelief, 
and there are those who are not entitled to 
their disbelief. 

Those who have a right to deny God's ex- 
istence and God's partiality are they who have 
really thought the matter through ; who have 
conscientiously weighed the pros and cons ; and 
have come to the deliberate conclusion, sadly 
and broken-heartedly, that this War disproves 
the fact of God and the truth of God's kindly 
interference in the affairs of mankind. Those 
who have a right to deny God's existence and 
God's partiality are they who throughout the 



FAITH AND THE WAR 23 

days of peace have lived close to God, and have 
followed, to the best of their ability, the ex- 
ample and the precepts of God's revelation of 
Himself in the person of His Son. 

Those who have no right to deny God's ex- 
istence and God's partiality are they who have 
disregarded the clarion importunities of the 
religious life during the years of peace; who 
have endeavored to effect in their own 
persons the irreconcilable compromise be- 
tween God and Mammon; and who have 
shown themselves to be unprofitable servants 
in the transaction of righteousness. Those 
who have no right to deny God's existence 
and God's partiality on account of this 
War are they who have not really thought 
the matter through; who have not con- 
scientiously weighed the pros and cons; 
and who have arrived at a snap judgment 
fostered by their preferences rather than by 
their persuasions. A friend of mine, the Rev. 
J. B. C. Murphy, one of the most eloquent 
chaplains in the British service, killed a few 
years ago by a fall from his horse, was once 
engaged in a religious controversy over the 
mess table in an East Indian barracks. The 
authenticity of portions of the Old Testament 
scriptures was in ribald dispute. One young 
subaltern in particular was vehement in his 
denunciation of the veracity of the account 
of Creation as contained in the first two 



24 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

chapters of the Book of Genesis, and ridi- 
culed, in florid phraseology, the truthfulness, 
either in the letter or the spirit of the 
narrative, of the marine epic of Jonah and 
the Whale. Mr. Murphy interrupted the 
torrential outburst of abuse, and, pointing 
his finger at the young man, said, amid 
a hush of silence which could be felt as well 
as heard, "Where were you, sir, last night?" 
The chaplain knew his man. The self-con- 
stituted higher critic was in the habit of break- 
ing the seventh commandment — "Thou shalt 
not commit adultery." The argumentation 
came to an abrupt conclusion, and the subaltern 
left the dinner table with an expression upon 
his face which must have been written upon the 
countenances of those Jews of olden time who, 
in response to the directive statement, "Let 
him that is without sin among you cast the first 
stone," left the presence of the Master and the 
sinful woman, "beginning at the oldest even 
unto the least." 

Those who have no right to deny God's ex- 
istence and God's partiality through this War 
are they who are morally unsound; who have 
something consciously "up their sleeve"; and 
who are not possessed of "the vision of the pure 
in heart". 

Now to those who have a right to deny God's 
existence and God's partiality because of this 
War — who have thought the matter through; 



FAITH AND THE WAR 25 

who have arrived at a conscientious conclu- 
sion; and who have really and practically be- 
lieved in God's existence and in God's benev- 
olent attitude towards His creation during the 
peaceful years prior to August 1914, — I would 
tender, and in no attitude of pharisaical superi- 
ority, my profoundest sympathy. A French 
writer has said, "Whenever I meet a man who 
has given up his belief in God I take off my 
hat to him, as to a man who has suffered an 
irreparable loss." Whenever I meet a man 
who has reached the conviction that "The 
Great Companion is dead", I take off my hat 
to him, even as I take off my hat to the hearse 
that passes me upon the street. The atmos- 
phere is an atmosphere of death. To live in 
this world believing that all things are hap- 
hazard; that there is no vital and consecutive 
significance in affairs both small and great; 
and that there is no "far-off divine event 
towards which the whole creation moves" — 
why, personally, I could not endure to exist 
for a day under such circumstances! 

To those who have a right to deny God's ex- 
istence and God's partiality through the crim- 
soned conditions of the present time I would 
say: "My friends, live up to the light which 
you possess; do the honest thing within the 
limits of your horizon though the heavens fall ; 
live in the association of those who do believe 
in the great fundamentals of life ; and keep an 



26 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

open mind until you may see this crisis of 
humanity in perspective — in relation to much 
that is to happen afterwards, as well as in 
relation to all that has gone before." 

Now, what as Christians and as Churchmen 
is our apologetic in the face of this War? 
What have we to say to the legitimate and the 
conscientious objector? I would speak phil- 
osophically rather than theologically, and base 
what I have to say upon common sense and 
my own conception of God and of God's rela- 
tion to Man rather than upon the letter or the 
tenor of Holy Scripture. 

(i) God is self -limited in respect of Man: 

This self-limitation of God does not for a 
moment, nor to any degree, vitiate the omnipo- 
tence of God. God's omnipotence is absolute; 
but it is voluntarily restricted relatively — in 
relation to Man. "God made man in His own 
Image" — "God breathed in Man the breath of 
life, and Man became a LIVING soul." 
Whether we believe in Man as instantly 
created, or as the crowning product of the 
evolutionary process, Man is a Sovereign 
Individual, possessed of Free Will, and re- 
sponsible for his own actions. The whole truth 
of the Christian Religion is based upon this 
fact. The Incarnation means nothing — less 
than nothing — unless such is the case. The 
Church is a farce, and the Sacramental System 
of the Church is an anachronism, if Man is 



FAITH AND THE WAR 27 

neither more nor less than a puppet at a ven- 
triloquist's show — bound to dance and sing 
at the ventriloquist's fancy. 

We recognize the reality of the exercise of 
Free Will in ordinary affairs. When I lie — 
do I blame God? When I lust — do I blame 
God? When I maliciously take away my 
neighbor's reputation — do I blame God? 
Surely not. I know that of myself I lie ; that 
of myself I lust; that of myself I bear false 
witness. When we walk through the slums 
of some great city, and mourn over the un- 
fortunate condition of the poor — do we accuse 
God? No. We speak of "man's inhumanity 
to man." When I live over an open sewer, 
and contract typhoid fever, do I blame God? 
No. I blame the drains, and either remedy 
matters, or remove my habitation. Governed 
by reason and sanity I take steps to prevent 
a recurrence of the disaster. When my 
neighbor has ten thousand dollars a year and a 
motor car, and I possess neither — do I blame 
God? No. I either blame the unfair priv- 
ileges of human society, or I deplore my own 
lack of acquisitive ability. When a villain 
rapes a girl — do we blame God? No. We 
anathematize the villain. 

Now — is God responsible for this War, and 
for all the blood-shot beastliness in connection 
therewith? Is God responsible for the fact 
that for some forty years the German nation 



28 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

has prepared for war? Surely not. The 
Kaiser, and the so-called Potsdam Gang, and 
the governing class of Germany, and the 
German philosophers, are responsible for the 
opening of the flood gates of Hell upon an 
unsuspecting universe. Is God responsible for 
this War? Surely not. The Allied Nations, 
to a lesser degree than the Nations of the 
Central Powers, are responsible for this War. 
We were material rather than spiritual; We 
were worldly in our behavior rather than 
other-worldly ; we followed the dictates of our 
own free will rather than the dictates of the 
Will of God. We failed — generally speaking 
— to base our conduct upon God's standard of 
conduct in the Person of His Son, the Prince 
of Peace, and we walked the broad road of 
pleasurable dalliance rather than the straight 
and narrow path of righteousness that leadeth 
into Life — individual, national, and interna- 
tional. Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Bul- 
garia are responsible for this War. Great 
Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Servia, Rou- 
mania, Portugal, Russia, and the United States 
of America are responsible for this War. Man, 
in the exercise of his free will, immediate and 
prolonged, is responsible for this War. 

If we accept individual responsibility, why 
should we not accept collective responsibility? 
Murder is the same in the many as in the few. 
If one man murders one man that man is a 



FAITH AND THE WAR 29 

murderer. He is recognized as such. If many 
men murder many men those men are mur- 
derers. If one man rapes a girl that man is a 
villain. If hundreds of men rape hundreds of 
girls — then, we have hundreds of villains. The 
single and the multiple come under the same 
category. Quantity does not repudiate the fact 
of quality either in virtue, or in vice. 

Man, then, is a responsible party. Our 
whole system of jurisprudence is founded and 
built upon that recognition; our business and 
professional and national and international 
affairs are run upon that hypothesis. For God 
to have prevented this War, or for God to step 
down and interrupt this War before it is fought 
out to a logical and permanent conclusion, 
would have been, and would be, for God to 
falsify all human estimate and prognosis in all 
things, both great and small. What Science 
calls "the uniformity of nature", Faith calls 
"the fidelity of God." God must be faithful to 
the trust which He has voluntarily imposed in 
Man. Only when men deliberately and con- 
sciously subject their wills to God's will may 
God work through men for the accomplishment 
of His heart's desire and the attainment of all 
that tells in the longest count for men's para- 
mount peace. The dignity of our life is based 
upon the intrinsic democracy of our life. God 
is not an Autocrat. God is not a Despot. 
There is nothing of the Kaiser about God. 



30 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

God is the Loving Father, and, as His children, 
we may either please, or displease, His Father's 
heart. God, in the highest sense, must make 
the world safe for democracy. Think on these 
things, elaborate them at length, and see 
whether or no you may logically conclude that 
God is responsible for this War; see whether 
or no this War is immeasurably more repug- 
nant to God than it is to us. 

(2) This War is an episode — Life is a con- 
tinuous performance: The record of the past 
four years must be considered in relation to 
the record of the centuries. An incident, how- 
ever prolonged, cannot eradicate a fact, or a 
series of facts. This War has not falsified the 
Argument from Design. There is still the 
Universe to be accounted for — in its existence, 
in its continuance, and in its adaptation of 
means to end. Despite the War the twenty 
million blazing suns are maintained in their 
progress through the heavens. Despite the 
War 1 the seasons of the year succeed one 
another in their orderly habit. Despite the 
War the earth is swinging around the sun at 
the rate of twenty miles a second, and we are 
mysteriously prevented from devasting collis- 
ion with planets, both great and small. This 
War has not falsified the historical truth of the 
Life of Jesus Christ. The word of Tacitus still 
stands: "J esus Christ was put to death when 
Pontius Pilate was Procurator of Judaea." 



FAITH AND THE WAR 31 

There is still the record of the Gospel story to 
be accounted for. There is still the Resurrec- 
tion to be explained — the Resurrection, which 
such an expert in legal evidence as Blackstone 
declared to be better authenticated than any 
other fact of history. This War has not an- 
nihilated conscience. On the contrary it seems 
to have quickened and enlivened conscience. 
The Categorical Imperative of Kant still 
thunders in our breasts. Conscience still 
makes us do those things which are contrary 
to our predilections, and even to our worldly 
prosperity. This War has not expunged the 
hungering for immortality. The reverse, as a 
matter of necessity, is the case. The words 
of the poet still hold true : 

"There is no death! What seems so is transition. 
This life of mortal breath 
Is but the suburb of the Life Elysian, 
Whose portal we call death." 

This War has not contradicted the historical 
facts of our historical Faith, nor has it stifled 
the religious instincts of man. The evidence 
that we seem to be leading ourselves at the 
present time — although the reality of our sole 
self-leadership at the present time is a question 
for discussion — does not wipe from the slate 
of the unending past the picture of God's 
leadership when, and so often as, we placed 



32 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

our hand in His Hand, and sought His far- 
seeing guidance ! 

If God was still with Jesus in the Garden of 
Gethsemane, and upon the Cross of Calvary; 
if neither of these experiences rejected the truth 
of God's Presence with Jesus throughout His 
previous Life; surely the presumption is that 
God is still with humanity as humanity sweats 
in the Garden, and as humanity agonizes upon 
the Cross. To hear some people speak at the 
present time you would think that there had 
never been a yesterday, and that there was 
never to be a to-morrow — that everything 
was contained within the blood-rimmed com- 
pass of to-day! 

Now, what as Christians and as Churchmen 
have we to say to the people — and there are 
many such people ; their speculations surcharge 
the atmosphere on every hand — who, through 
this War, have come to disbelieve in God's 
benevolent attitude towards man? 

There are several things to be said, several 
things to be remembered and to be emphasized 
in their remembrance, in this connection. 

(i) There is Immortality — the cardinal doc- 
trine of our Religion : If this life is all ; if ex- 
istence is confined to birth and the grave; 
then, death is an awful thing, and wholesale 
death is altogether appalling. This World's 
delight is, indeed, "lightning that mocks the 



FAITH AND THE WAR 33 

night." But, if this life is not everything ; if it 
is but the beginning of things ; if it is the pre- 
face to the Book, the prelude to the opera; if 
existence stretches out from birth through the 
grave, and into all eternity ; then, death is not 
necessarily awful, and wholesale death is not 
unrelievedly appalling. If God "has prepared 
for those who unfeignedly love Him such 
good things as pass man's understanding", 
if "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither 
hath entered into the heart of man to con- 
ceive" the experience of the never-ending 
future, then, it is not the journey thither 
that we have to consider, neither is it the 
means of release from the lesser to the 
greater; it is the destination; it is the 
attainment of the objective ; it is the realization 
of the goal. The pain of a bayonet thrust, or 
the anguish of a bursting bomb, or the choking 
sensation of a gaseous vapor, is a minor 
matter, in continuance and in degree, as com- 
pared with the awakening "in Christ's own 
likeness, satisfied." The wholesale death of 
the past four years is only the focussing con- 
centration of the recognized and universal 
truth that all men must, sooner or later, die, 
and die in order that they may live in 
unprecedented abundance of life. 

(2) There is our Cause : What are we fight- 
ing for? Is our Cause worthy, worthy of the 
uttermost self-sacrifice involved, or is it not? 



34 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

Christ died for humanity. Is it too much to 
say that the Allied Nations are dying for 
humanity? Christ's death was justified under 
the circumstances. Is it too much to suggest 
that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of 
men are justified under the circumstances? 
Christ died for the redemption of mankind. Is 
it too much to say that we are dying for the 
redemption of generations as yet unborn? 
Christ was a vicarious Sacrifice. May it not 
be that the soldiers and sailors and aviators of 
the United States, and her Allies, are vicarious 
sacrifices for the stability and future well-being 
of men throughout the ages? Christ came to 
"do the work of Him that sent Him." May it 
not be that through us God is accomplishing 
the greatest and the most enduring good for 
the greatest number ? Christ was "sent" of God 
— willingly "sent", it is true ; there was no an- 
tagonism between the Father and the Son in 
the matter; commissioned of God to live a 
suffering life and to die a suffering death "for 
us men, and for our salvation." May it not be 
that we of this generation are consecrated of 
God to perform a like service of effective salva- 
tion for the peoples who are to inhabit this 
universe until "the consummation of the 
days"? It is at least possible, personally I 
deem it to be most probable, that an extraor- 
dinary ministry has been entrusted to the 
men and women of this second decade of the 



FAITH AND THE WAR 35 

Twentieth Century, and that the fulfillment of 
our dignity depends upon the performance of 
our ministry — not upon an evasion of our 
responsibility, nor the attempt to escape from 
under the hands of our Consecrator. Our at- 
titude should be this: Things being as they 
are, and as they have been for some time, 
through man's wayward wandering from the 
ways of God, War was inevitable; but now it 
is the privilege and prerogative of all decent- 
minded men, of all men who believe in the 
ultimate supremacy of the Christian ethic, of 
all men who believe that in the long run "right 
is might," to fight for the establishment of 
things as they ought to be, as they ought to be 
in relation to the productive association of 
society at large, and as we have a reason to 
suppose that God would have them be. The 
strain is tremendous. The test is heart-split- 
ting. The demand reaches to the deepest fibres 
of the soul. But, the duty of redemption, the 
task of salvation, are imposed upon us, indi- 
rectly by human living in the past, directly by 
God's consecration in the present, and rather 
than let the cup pass from us, we shall drain 
the crimsoned wine to the very dregs. 

(3) There is evidence to the effect that God 
is with us: One hesitates to make such an 
assertion as this ; because the Kaiser is, appar- 
ently, assured that God is with him. The point 
is however, that the Kaiser is not infallible, 



36 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

and may be suffering under a delusion. It is 
at least possible that God is "on our side", and 
the facts of the case would seem to indicate 
that such is the case. The "German God", the 
God created by the German imagination, a 
mere figment of the mind, and in his thinking 
related to the German process of reasoning, is, 
undoubtedly, on the German side. The God 
of Christ, however, the Father who loves His 
children, and "would not even the death of 
a sinner"; the God who abhors cruelty and 
atrocity ; the God who would not that the Ser- 
mon on the Mount should be treated as "a 
scrap of paper", is with the Allied Nations — 
and there is evidence to that effect. Is it short 
of miraculous that at the Battle of the Marne 
the German hordes should have been rolled 
back, and rolled back ignominiously, from the 
coveted Paris of their dreams? Ask any man 
who participated in the Retreat of Mons, and 
who was present at the battle which proved 
to be the crucial turning point in the contest 
between Civilization and Barbarism, and he 
will tell you that on that occasion at least God 
was not "on the side of the stronger Battal- 
ions." Is it short of miraculous that during 
the first twelve months of the War, the British 
line in Flanders should have held when the 
Germans were firing twelve shells to the 
British one? Ask the men of Neuve Chapelle, 
and Givenchy, and Ypres, and they will tell 



FAITH AND THE WAR 37 

you that almost any moment during the initial 
year of the conflict the Germans might, if they 
would, have broken through their unsupported 
resistence even as the storm-wooed breakers 
of the ocean break through an extemporized 
dyke in hasty process of construction. Is it 
short of miraculous that peace-loving nations, 
unsuspecting through their confidence in 
human nature, should have been able, up to the 
present time, to stem the Teutonic tide, and to 
create a preparedness, a technical preparedness, 
in four years equal to the German prepared- 
ness of forty years? Surely these things 
testify to God's interest upon the side of 
righteousness — and to the uttermost limits of 
His self-imposed self-limitation in respect of 
Man! 

(4) There are the Mourners: Has God 
proved Himself to be "a very present help in 
time of trouble"? There are thousands upon 
thousands of sorrowing ones, mothers and 
fathers and wives and brothers and sisters 
and children and relatives and friends of 
those who have "fallen in battle", who will 
rise up, with tear-dried eyes, and recon- 
structed lives, and say, "He has." The Holy 
Ghost, the Comforter, carrying on invisibly 
and unseen the very presence, position, and 
ministry of the Incarnate Christ, has been 
occupied in season and out of season during 
the past four years with the Mourner. He has 



38 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

bound up the broken-hearted; He has soothed 
the distressed; He has consoled the sad; He 
has strengthened the weak; and on an inten- 
sive and extensive scale unprecedented in 
history. He has bestowed "the peace that 
passeth all human understanding/' and over 
countless darkened lives, lives engloomed with 
the shadow of death, He has shed "the light 
that never was on land or sea." In the United 
States of America, up to the present time, we 
have not really realized this fact; but it is a 
fact, and a fact affirmed whole-heartedly by 
those who have had their loved ones go down 
into the silences only to discover that the 
silences are most eloquent with speech. Verily, 
it was expedient for Christ that He should go 
away, that the Comforter might come. Since 
August, 1914, the Comforter has come — and 
with healing in His wings ! 

*r "* * *P Sf' T 

There is something to be said, then, despite 
this War, about the existence and the benevo- 
lence of God. There is a Christian apologetic 
capable of almost endless elaboration. There 
are reasons why men should accept God in 
times of storm as well as in days of sunshine, 
and bear the burdens as well as enjoy the 
gaieties of life. The Passion of our God is 
just as real, and just as applicable to human 
experience, as the Power and the Kindness of 
our 1 God. Men and women, honest men and 



FAITH AND THE WAR 39 

women, clean living men and women, men and 
women who have nothing to gain and every- 
thing to lose through unbelief, should think on 
these things, and discover, so far as they in- 
dividually are concerned, the "balance of 
probability" on the one side or the other. They 
owe it to themselves; they owe it to their 
fellows ; and they owe it to their God — if there 
be a God. 

The way of the War has been longer than 
we dreamed. Some of us have been walking 
for four years the crimsoned path. We have 
been in the deep gorges of humiliation and dis- 
appointment. We have passed — those of us 
with friends and relatives at the front — we 
have passed again and again through the 
valley of the shadow of death. And, the end 
is not yet! But let us see to it — those of us 
who may conscientiously do so — that our Faith 
does not fail us in the time of crisis, and that, 
caught in the eddy of a maelstrom that seems 
to know no pity, we conduct ourselves as men, 
foursquare to all the winds that blow. Then, 
perchance, we shall be worthy to be numbered 
among the copartners of God in the ultimate 
reversal of War for Peace — when there shall 
be "a new Heaven and a new Earth, wherein 
dwelleth righteousness." 



COMBATANT AND NON-COMBATANT 

PAUL and Silas, on one occasion, had been 
cast into prison — into the inmost ward. 
Such an environment, however, could not 
dampen the ardor of their spirits. The Peace 
of God resident within their hearts was alto- 
gether impervious to the squalor of their sur- 
roundings. "Stone walls did not a prison 
make, nor iron bars a cage." Their internal 
joy found outward expression. "At midnight 
they sang hymns, and the prisoners heard 
them." 

Tradition tells us that some of the prisoners, 
rough men and suffering the just penalties of 
their misdoings, were so impressed with the 
attitude of the disciples, with their unconven- 
tional treatment of accredited misfortune, that 
they became Christians. Be that as it may, 
Paul and Silas must necessarily have contrib- 
uted to the enheartenment of their fellow- 
inmates, and awakened a new-found hope in the 
breasts of those who were saturated with des- 
pair. Singing for mere singing's sake, burst- 
ing into spontaneous song because of the 



COMBATANT AND NON-COMBATANT 41 

realized presence of the Christ within their 
lives, they performed, unwittingly but realisti- 
cally, a ministry, an influential ministry, of 
cheer and comfort to those who were in the 
self-same condemnation with themselves. "At 
midnight Paul and Silas sang hymns, and 
the prisoners heard them." And, hearing them 
the prisoners were better men and saner men, 
some of them forever ! 

Men by the hundreds of thousands, nay, by 
the millions, in our own country and through- 
out the Allied lands, have recently, during the 
course of the past four years, been thrown into 
prison. They have been removed, either vol- 
untarily, or by legal enactment, from their 
regular vocations, from the absorbing interests 
of the present and the rainbowed promises of 
the future, from their homes and loved ones, 
from all that life would normally hold most 
dear, and plunged into the outermost or 
the innermost ward of war's alarms. They 
have been called upon, either in theory or in 
actuality, to make the supreme sacrifice, to 
place their lives in jeopardy, or to surrender 
their lives with willing gladness, that right 
may triumph over wrong, and that humanity 
throughout the ensuing ages may be permitted 
to achieve its lawful destiny. The imprison- 
ment is real, in figure if not in fact, and the 
environment, stretching from improvised cities 



42 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

of primitive habitations to the blood-wetted 
trenches of the battle field, is all that could 
be well devised to test beyond the breaking 
point the stamina of men accustomed to the 
surroundings of luxury and of ease. "And at 
midnight'' — the midnight of the world, and 
the midnight of their own experience — "and 
at midnight" these modern Pauls and Silases 
"sing hymns"! Sensible of the presence of 
their God; conscious of the losing of their 
lives for their brethren's sakes and for the 
salvation of the generations yet unborn ; forti- 
fied by the recognition that they have gained 
the commendation of their fellows, and that 
they have attained the coronation of their self- 
respect ; these men, these noble men, these men 
who in their attitude partake less of the human 
than of the divine, are filling the Universe 
with joyous gladness, and ringing the earth, 
the sky, and sea with tumultuous acclaim. 

Men and women by the hundreds of thou- 
sands, nay by the millions, in our own country 
and throughout the Allied lands, have recently, 
during the past four years, been thrown into 
prison. Condemned to the "daily round, the 
common task", through circumstances beyond 
their legitimate control, they have had to re- 
main at home, pursuing the well-trodden path 
of familiar duty, whilst their comrades have 
answered the Call to Arms, and the hemi- 
spheres have rocked as in the titanic embrace 



COMBATANT AND NON-COMBATANT 43 

of lust-wooed giants. For them, aye, for us, 
there has been none of the glory of the battle 
field, and none of the peril. There has been 
little excitement, and less romance. The 
sounds of conflict have issued from afar, and 
the clash of the contending forces has been de- 
picted in the newspapers, rather than visual- 
ized in fact. The sense, the awful sense, of 
waste, of talent and mediocrity thrown into 
the crucible of destruction regardless of salvage 
or distinction, of the loss, the irremediable loss, 
to civilization through the unexpected inroads 
of recurrent barbarism, have besieged our im- 
aginations to the verge of madness, and be- 
yond. We have seen the structure of society, 
laboriously erected through centuries of patient 
toil, overturned from foundation to coping 
stone, and our hearts have been sick within us, 
our souls exceedingly sorrowful, even unto 
death. It has been hard, suprisingly hard, to 
do the same old things in the same old way, 
and to attend to our newly accumulated obli- 
gations with an enthusiasm commensurate 
with the need. In disappointment over the 
wreckage of the past, in distress over the un- 
settlement of the present; and in dismay over 
the possibilities of the future, we have played 
our parts with grim determination, but in a 
world of darkened shadows, with the night 
winds moaning along the reaches of the valley 
of death. 



44 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

Yes ! Humanity, in a very real sense, is in 
prison. Combatant and non-combatant hu- 
manity is incarcerated within the confines of an 
untoward suffering and discipline, and the free- 
dom of life, the unrestricted liberty of thought 
and movement, has, for the time being, passed 
away — beyond the bounds of expedient recall. 
The soldiers and sailors and aviators of the 
United States and her Allies — whether at "the 
front", or in the cantonments of the Homeland ; 
the home populations of America, and France, 
and England, and all the rest, destined to the 
road of the commonplace, rather than to the 
path of glory, are committed to a dwelling- 
place of barred windows, and sunless courts, 
and cheerless cells — to the inmost ward of the 
heart's captivity, and the soul's enshacklement. 

Moreover, it is midnight — deep, brooding, 
and impenetrable midnight. The glimmer of 
the twilight has faded in the west ; the evanes- 
cent radiances that follow sunset have been 
succeeded by the ever-thickening gloom; and 
the first grey streaks of early dawn have not 
as yet shed their effulgence over land and sea. 
Things are at their worst, at their unbelievable 
worst, and the stillness of disaster, the silence 
of seeming failure, charge the prison house 
from end to end, filling the prisoners with 
nameless apprehensions, and foreboding fears. 

It is now, however, that we hear the sounds 
of singing in the night. From the banks of 



COMBATANT AND NON-COMBATANT 45 

the Tigris, from the jungles of Africa, from 
the sandy wastes of Mesopotamia, from the 
rock-ribbed slopes of the Holy Land, from the 
mountain heights of Italy, from the shell-shot 
fields of Flanders, from the training camps of 
England and America, there arises a song of 
revelry, as holy as it is profane, as spontaneous 
as it is prolonged — the resurgent anthem of 
joy-infested men, keeping watch over the des- 
tinies of their fellow-men, and eradicating the 
weeds in the Garden of Mankind that the 
Flower of Peace may thrive and grow. It is 
the music of youth ; of youth vibrant and hope- 
ful ; of youth untarnished and undefiled by the 
compromises and equivocations of the world; 
and it has in it the promise of "a new heaven 
and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteous- 
ness". It is the most glorious hymn that has 
ever been sung this side of Heaven's gate, and 
it fills our hearts with throbbings, our eyes 
with tears, with tears of prideful love, too deep 
for words. It is the spirit, it is the very spirit, 
of the Christ, who "set His face steadfastly to 
go up to Jerusalem," and who "for the joy 
that was set before Him, endured the Cross, 
despising the shame." 

"And at midnight they sang hymns — and 
the prisoners heard them." These men at the 
Front, and these men who are preparing for the 
Front, these khaki clad knights who are en- 
gaged in a wondrous quest, the relief of the 



46 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

oppressed and the emancipation of humanity 
from the throes of a threatened slavery, are 
giving us an example which it were well for us 
to follow, and the unconscious ministry of their 
soulful singing should make us better men and 
women, and saner men and women — some of 
us forever. 



* 



"And at midnight Paul and Silas sang 
hymns — and the prisoners heard them." 

What does this modern singing mean? And 
what is the response that we, the prisoners of 
home defence, should make? 

(i) The song is a song of sacrifice; it arises 
from the deeps of unselfish hearts. Ask any 
man on active service, "Whence springs your 
obvious contentment with your lot? You 
have renounced for the time being and, the 
chances are, for the period of your earthly life, 
your home, your friends, and the pursuit of 
your career; you are engaged in a venture 
which entails privation and suffering and hard- 
ship unprecedented in all your previous ex- 
perience ; and yet there is that about you which 
tells me, in the shining of your eye, in the 
sprightliness of your step, and in the clearness 
of your mind, that you are happier, far happier, 
than you have ever been before. What is the 
secret of your joy; what the recipe of your 
sunlit laughter ; what the power that has over- 



COMBATANT AND NON-COMBATANT 47 

shadowed thee, and brought to pass a new 
thing in the world?" 

Ask any man on active service that question, 
and the answer, articulate or inarticulate, ex- 
pressed in halting sentences or phrased in 
choicest language, will resolve itself into this: 

"I have learned to live for others." 

This has been up to the present hour, and I 
believe that it will so prove to be in the per- 
manent issue of things, the most stupendous 
discovery of this War. Men who formerly 
lived for themselves, and for themselves alone, 
have mastered the paramount lesson of the 
Christ, that "it is more blessed to give than to 
receive", and that the first and the last step in 
the saving of personality is the deliberate obla- 
tion of self. Should nothing else come out of 
this Gethsemane of the nations, this, at least, 
would be well worth while, worthy of the agony 
and the bloody sweat, that men who have here- 
tofore valued life for the opportunity of getting 
should have come to appreciate life for its 
privileges of giving ; and that they should con- 
sider no sacrifice too great for the welfare of 
humanity, no surrender too expensive for the 
salvation of a friend. 

This is the burden of the Song at Midnight 
— of Tipperary, and Over There, and the other 
tuneful lilts which, though not hymns for 
Christian Worship, still, like the wound of 
Mercutio, will serve — which you and I, prison- 



48 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

ers of home defence, have heard, and shall not 
the hearing awaken responsive echoes in our 
hearts? Shall we not dedicate our days and 
talents to the service of our fellows rather 
than to the service of ourselves, and lose the 
smallness of our interests that we may find the 
greatness of our interests in the prosecution 
of a world-wide cause ? 

Verily, this much is expected of us, and to 
fall short of the expectation is to do despite to 
the honor of the men who are fighting the 
battles of civilization, and who are holding the 
intervening spaces between us and a destruc- 
tion worse than death. That there is a spirit of 
selflessness abroad in the land, a spirit that is 
inspiring men and women to the prosecution of 
humanitarian tasks and patriotic endeavors, 
and on a scale in league with the compass of 
the situation, no thoughtful, observant, and 
hopeful participant, or onlooker, may gainsay ; 
but is there not, in many cases, a selfhood in 
the business which robs the business of its 
beauty, and bespeaks the motive of personal 
recognition rather than the desire to perform 
without applause that which the necessities of 
the occasion would imply? When men are 
dying for us, and dying gladly ; when men, in 
full view of all the consequences involved, have 
made the initial decision which engenders con- 
tinued renunciation; surely it is a miserable 
thing that in the societies organized for the 



COMBATANT AND NON-COMBATANT 49 

relief of suffering, and the amelioration of the 
ravages of War, there should be personal jeal- 
ousies, and petty spites, and minor differences 
of opinion, leading to major interruptions of 
operation, and that people should so forget 
themselves as to remember themselves in the 
wretched commendation which is their legal 
due! We must remember that the wounding 
of our feelings at a time when men are dying 
of their wounds is altogether beyond the logic 
of the situation — for we have no feelings to be 
wounded when the universe is trembling in the 
balance, and when the scales of freedom and 
slavery are so finely weighted on either side. 
"And the prisoners heard them." Let us dis- 
cover at least this portent within the song: 
That to be thinking of self at a time like this 
is the unpardonable sin — to be forgiven by 
neither God nor men ; and the one inexcusable 
offence against manners and good taste, in- 
capable of redemption either in this world, or 
in the next. 

(2) The song is a religious song. It is a 
hymn which has its genesis in the seriousness 
of men and things, of life and death. 

It is a well-known fact that men on leave 
from the trenches of Flanders and Northern 
France have been shocked at the apparent 
frivolity of London, and Paris, and the other 
centers of population, where they have gone 
to spend their well-earned rest. Exposed for 



50 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

days and weeks on end to the hail of shrapnel 
and the fumes of choking gas; arriving from 
scenes of carnage and death, where blood has 
flowed like water, and where the heavens have 
been redolent with the lurid flames of destiny ; 
it has seemed an incredible and a monstrous 
thing that people should seemingly be engaged 
in the even tenor of their customary pursuits, 
and find their happiness as of yore in the fleet- 
ing pleasures of the passing moment. In some 
cases this recognition has been so poignant, 
and so overwhelming, so filled with heart- 
break and an all pervading sense of gross in- 
justice, that the soldier has returned to the field 
of battle before his specified holiday has run 
its course — determined to cancel all opportuni- 
ties of relaxation in the future, and to remain 
grimly at his post of danger until the victory 
is won. 

At midnight the soldier sings, and the sailor 
too; songs of homeland, and songs of love; 
songs of bathos, and songs of mirthful merri- 
ment ; but these songs are not what they seem. 
Their flippancy is born of a soberness beyond 
the reach of speech, and the surface lightness 
covers a solemnity that laughs in the face of 
death — because to weep in the face of death 
would be both unmanly and unsound. At mid- 
night the soldier sings, and the sailor too ; but 
the soldier is no fool, and the sailor has his 



COMBATANT AND NON-COMBATANT 51 

expectations. We, the prisoners who hear, 
must take heed what we hear. 

There is only one thing worth thinking about 
at the present time — and that is this War. 
There is only one thing worth doing at the 
present time — and that is, in small measure or 
in large measure, in proportion with our oppor- 
tunities, to assist in the winning of this War. 
There is only one dream worth dreaming at the 
present time, and that must be a dream of 
action rather than a dream of passive contem- 
plation — and that is the apocalypse of a lasting 
Peace, when the swords shall be beaten into 
ploughshares, and when, the lion lying down 
with the lamb, a little child shall lead the 
vanguard of humanity. Everything must be 
subordinated to these occupations, these occu- 
pations which are in reality one absorbing 
occupation ; all other preferences must be cast 
aside — whether the accumulation of individual 
wealth, or the achievement of individual suc- 
cess, or the experience of personal pleasure; 
all other considerations, normal, perhaps, with- 
in themselves, but abnormal in relation to the 
exigencies of the present hour, must go by the 
board, and be tabooed by honest-hearted men 
and women; for the crucial struggle of the 
ageless ages is upon us, and strong men pant 
and reel, fall and rise again, in the remorseless, 
uncompromising embrace of Right with Might. 
To be true to ourselves; to be true to our 



52 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

neighbors; to be true to our God; and to be 
true to the noble warriors who are fighting 
our part in the conflict; we must conform our 
aspirations and our practices to the similitude 
of untoward circumstances, and match our 
behavior with the behavior of the men on active 
service. 

There must be no disparity in essence be- 
tween the life of the cities of the Allied lands, 
the cities situated outside the zone of danger, 
and the life of the man in the first line trenches 
who is bearing the burden and heat of the 
freighted day, that Democracy may throw off 
the reins of Tyranny, and that Liberty, Equal- 
ity, and Fraternity may dwell and prosper, un- 
hampered and unrestricted, forever upon the 
Earth. 

"And the prisoners heard them." "He that 
hath ears to hear — let him hear." 



THE CHURCH AND 
THE RECONSTRUCTION PERIOD 

HOW are we ministers and people of the 
Church to make the Church ready for the 
reception of the men who have fought our bat- 
tles, and the battles of Civilization, and whose 
shoe latchets, perchance, we are not worthy to 
unloose ? It is a pertinent interrogation — espe- 
cially in view of the inherent difficulties in- 
volved. We are to fascinate men, many of 
them the same men whom we have not fasci- 
nated before, and all of them men who have 
added extraordinarily to their stature by the 
untoward experiences through which they have 
passed. 

The Reconstruction Period lies before us. 
How may the Stay-At-Home members of the 
Church begin, even in anticipation, to recon- 
struct the Church? 

There are some things that the soldiers Over 
Seas have learned — things that our own men 
will learn before this War is over, and on the 
blood-soaked fields of France. In the face of 
imminent death these men have, consciously or 



54 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

unconsciously, discovered the realization that 
Christianity counts for much, and that De- 
nominationalism in Christianity counts for less 
than nothing. They have seen their comrades 
die as Christians ; but they have not seen their 
comrades die as Presbyterian, or Methodist, or 
Roman Catholic, or Episcopalian Christians. 

General Byng, the hero of the November 
drive on the Western Front, said recently in 
the course of conversation with a friend of 
mine, a conversation which was repeated to me 
verbatim two weeks after its occurrence : 
"Give me Christian young men. They endure 
the monotony better than non-Christian men, 
and their valor is unequalled in the hour of 
crisis. This prevalent idea that the dare-devil 
and the harum-scarum men make the best 
fighters is all wrong. The decent living man 
is the decent fighting man." "General," re- 
plied my friend, "I am glad to hear you say 
that. As a parson it does my soul good. It 
is a comfort to know that when put to the test 
the work of the Churches has stood the strain. 
I should like, however, to ask just this : Could 
you, through your experience, differentiate be- 
tween the Christians? Are the members of 
any one religious body, taken in the aggregate, 
better soldiers than the members of any other 
religious body ?" "No," answered the doughty 
Commander, "there is no distinction of sect. 



THE RECONSTRUCTION PERIOD 55 

Irish, Scotch, English, Canadian, Australian, 
New Zealand Christians all fight like hell !" 

I had the privilege a short time ago of spend- 
ing several mornings in the London office of 
the Canadian Director of Chaplains' Service, 
and of coming into intimate contact with the 
commissioned officers of the executive staff. 
The Director of Chaplains' Service is an An- 
glican priest; his secretary is a Methodist 
minister; and his two chief assistants are, 
respectively, a Presbyterian professor and a 
Franciscan monk! These men, two colonels, 
and two majors, live in the same suite of rooms, 
their desks almost touching one another, and 
in utmost good comradeship, in mutual affec- 
tion, in perfect harmony and understanding, 
and exercising jurisdiction over some two hun- 
dred and eighty chaplains of all denominations 
on active service in the fields of France and 
Macedonia. 

What a sight for angels and men, and, 
above all, what a sight for partisan Christians 
at home! 

Now our men are beginning, even in the 
training camps of the Homeland, to achieve 
this atmosphere of religious oneness, and more 
and more as their experience increases in the 
arena of hostilities they will appreciate the 
fact that a padre, be he a Congregationalist or 
otherwise, is a padre for all that. When they 
come home again they will bring this spirit of 



56 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

unqualified tolerance along with them, and 
repudiate as they would repudiate the Devil all 
tangible evidences of narrowmindedness. The 
chaplains when they return — and by the very 
nature of the case they will win a following 
and exert an influence in proportion to the 
dramatic part which they have played in this 
season of World Upheaval — the chaplains 
when they return will, if needs be, uncover the 
roof, and break up within their respective 
spheres, all obstacles that would hinder the 
unhampered intercourse of Christians of what- 
ever stripe with one another. It is essential, 
then — before this War is over and the men 
return from the Front — that there should be a 
most real rapprochement between all the organ- 
ized religious forces in the United States of 
America. There is a spirit of tolerance abroad, 
and for this we should be devoutedly thankful, 
it is a wonderful advance over the pharisaical 
insularism of the past; but this spirit of toler- 
ance, altogether nebulous and indefinable, is 
not enough. There must be an unqualified 
appreciation of our mutual sincerities, such as 
shall dissipate all semblance of self-conscious 
superiority, either in attitude or in act. There 
is no need for anyone to do despite to his con- 
victions — as a matter of fact, the deeper the 
conviction the greater the meed of Christian 
charity — but there is every need that everyone 
should do active honor to the diverse conclu- 



THE RECONSTRUCTION PERIOD 57 

sions of differentiated temperaments. We 
must even be prepared to go upon the assump- 
tion that our fellows are possessed of six senses, 
whereas we are only possessed of five, and that 
whilst with our endowment of thought and 
feeling a certain point of view is the only point 
of view, it is at least conceivable that to the 
distinctive endowments of other people "the 
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the 
truth" should be apprehended in another 
fashion and in contrasted degree. 

The time has come when the platitude that 
"the Church was made for man, and not man 
for the Church, and that if the individual can- 
not find God in one Branch of the Christian 
Society he may still find God in another Branch 
of the Christian Society," should be realized, 
and in a practical manner, in our midst. 

Another thing which our men will have 
learned before they discard their khaki uni- 
forms of civilian attire is this : "The boundaries 
of reality/' 

"How did you feel the first time you ever 
went over the top?" I asked a private in 
a Canadian battalion who, conspicuous for 
his bravery, was wearing the Distinguished 
Conduct Medal. 

"How did I feel? Why, I felt as though I 
had been asleep all my life, and had just waked 
up. I was real; the Germans were real; God 
was real ; and afterward, shortly afterward, 
my wound was real, most real." 



58 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

This, so far as I have been able to gather 
from somewhat extensive intercourse with the 
men on active service, is the paramount and 
underlying realization of Warfare — the over- 
powering reality of life and death, of self and 
God; the rushing to the surface of thought 
and feeling which have seemingly been in- 
hibited since birth. All the pent up sensi- 
bilities of conscious existence are released ; all 
the smothered desires of personality are set 
free, and, in the vortex of a quickened aware- 
ness, compromise and convention and super- 
ficiality are buried deep — beyond the reach of 
all possible resurrection. 

This is undoubtedly the explanation of the 
fact — for it is a fact, and beyond the touch of 
reasonable dispute — that in this War theology 
has failed, and failed miserably, to stand the 
test imposed upon it; whereas religion has 
passed through the crucible unscathed, and 
come into its everlasting own. Theology is of 
man — it partakes of the imperfections of human 
speculation concerning the Truth ; but Religion 
is of God — it is possessed of the perfection of 
Divine Revelation of the truth. Theology is 
less than real, Religion is most real. 

I tell you candidly, and I am quite ready 
to be frowned upon as a heretic, or spurned 
as an ignoramus, or pitied as an ecclesiastical 
demagogue — I tell you candidly that in my 
opinion the day has come, or is shortly to 



THE RECONSTRUCTION PERIOD 59 

arrive, when we must adapt our logically 
constructed system of Christianity to men, 
rather than continue to expect men to 
become adapted to our preconceived ideas. 
The theology of the study, running in orderly 
fashion from premises to conclusion and in- 
vulnerable against the envenomed darts of 
dialectical assault, does not "pan out" in the 
street, it fails of convincingness in the shop, 
and it is impotent in the wooing of men to 
citizenship in the kingdom of God. 

Reality — whole-souled, and red-blooded, 
reality — in our preaching and in our living and 
in the whole paraphernalia of our Church ad- 
ministration ; this will be demanded of us by 
the men who return from the trenches ; by the 
men who have pierced through the crust of 
life into the heart of life ; and who have looked, 
unafraid but disillusioned, into the greedy eyes 
of avaricious death. 



Another thing which the Church must do to 
win the men of the future — and I restrict my- 
self to this: The Church in her atmosphere, an 
atmosphere created and fostered by clergy 
and people, must bespeak a broader charity of 
behavior than is to be met with in the outside world. 

There is an impression, a seemingly in- 
eradicable impression, in the minds of many 
men — I met with it over and over again in the 
minds of the men across the water — that 



60 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

Church people are, taken in the average, a 
somewhat cantankerous and faultfinding set. 
There is, of course, small excuse for such an 
impression ; but who would suggest that there 
is no excuse for such an allegation? In what 
ought to be the Abode of Love there is often to 
be discovered much else save love. In what 
ought to be the greatest Brotherhood of all 
brotherhoods there is frequently to be found 
a patent lack of the first essentials of all 
brotherliness. 

Men look on and see — What do they see? 
Why; they see that clergymen who ought to 
be the most magnanimous of men are not, as a 
class, celebrated for their appreciation of one 
another's worth. They see that there is such 
a thing as parochialism — congregations pitted 
one against another in unholy competition. 
They see instances of ministers turned out of 
their charges by unchristlike people, and at a 
time of life when they could not reasonably 
expect to procure new employment. They see 
societies in the same Church, and individ- 
uals in those societies, quarreling with one 
another. They see men and women kneeling 
at the sanctuary rail, partaking of the Sacra- 
ment of Love, and then in the outside world 
refusing to recognize or to have anything to do 
with one another. Men look on and see these 
things, and seeing them they think thoughts 



THE RECONSTRUCTION PERIOD 61 

unutterable which cause them forever after- 
ward to "pass by on the other side." 

At S Camp, in England, and this 

condition is symptomatic of conditions which 
prevail in the religious sphere in all the train- 
ing and rest camps in England, and in more 
marked degree at the Front in France — at 

S Camp the average attendance of 

officers at a mass service in any of the Y. M. 
C. A. Huts is five, and that out of a total 
average attendance of some five hundred men. 
One reason for this is, of course, the caste sys- 
tem in the Army ; for any Army, the American 
Army included, is the most undemocratic or- 
ganization under the sun, and necessarily so. 
But there is another reason, a reason which 
was stated to me by the best living and most 
influential officer in his battalion. "Why do 
you not come to any of our services?" I asked 
this man. "Oh," was the reply, "I am never 
to be discovered where Christians are congre- 
gated together." I sought an explanation, and 
the explanation was this : "I have a reputation 
to maintain. I cannot afford to have my char- 
acter torn to shreds." What do you think of 
that? Incredible, but, sad to relate, possessed 
of a modicum of the truth, and, moreover, the 
ipse dixit of a man who is a prince among his 
fellows. 

We must learn to love one another in the 
Church of the Living God. Clergy and clergy ; 



62 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

clergy and people ; people and people. We must 
learn to love one another. We must learn to 
look for the best, and to believe in the best, in 
our fellow-men. We must go upon the pre- 
sumption that a man is innocent until he is 
proved guilty, and when he is proved guilty 
we must love the sinner even whilst we loathe 
the sin. We must be "kind one to another; 
tender hearted ; forgiving one another ; even as 
God, for Christ's sake has forgiven us." 



These, then, it seems to me, are some of the 
things, among many other things, that we 
clergy and laity are called upon to do, either 
in the immediate present or in the imminent 
future, if we would make the Church attractive, 
and more than attractive, alluring, to the 
returned heroes of post war days. 

We must be Christians, Christians pure and 
simple, before we are Episcopalian Christians. 
Denominationalism is almost dead, and the 
energies of a resurrected world are to be 
employed in other directions. 

We must discard convention and super- 
ficiality; adopting an attitude of realism in all 
things. The occasion for platitude has passed, 
and the occasion for living fact has come. 

And, we must magnify, in our intercourse 
with one another and in our association with 
the stranger within our gate, love, bejewelled 



THE RECONSTRUCTION PERIOD 63 

love, greater than faith, more majestic than 
hope — the lodestar of Christian fellowship. 
Only from such a sowing may we expect 
a right glorious reaping. 

Prepare ye, O prepare ye, the Way of the 
Lord; make His paths straight. 



THE CLOUD OF THE WAR, AND 
THE SILVER LINING 

WE are all depressed at the present time. 
We are moving about enfolded in a dark- 
some cloud. Life is out of gear; civilization 
is apparently knocked on the head; the world 
is suffering from nervous prostration. The 
universality of death ; the catholicity of self- 
sacrifice; the far spread uncertainty of the im- 
mediate future ; have weighted our spirits to 
the ground. The War is on our minds and in 
our hearts. 

We are brave in the face of untoward facts J 
we are filled with a high-handed pretense of 
courage in the presence of unprecedented ex- 
perience ; we are obviously doing the same old 
things in the same old way; but, beneath the 
surface of appearances there is an anguish that 
besets our every movement, and a living agony 
that banishes the accustomed measure of sleep 
from our staring eyes. 

We need, we need with a pathos and an ur- 
gency which there is no gainsaying, a message 
of comfort to help us throughout the days, and 



THE CLOUD AND ITS SILVER LINING 65 

an interpretation of prevalent facts which will 
enable us to perceive a rainbowed promise in 
the midst of storm. We demand salvation, 
salvation in the vortex of seeming damnation, 
salvation through hope. 

^ ^ # * * * 

What is there in this present War that should 
make us "strong and of a good courage"? 
Every cloud has its silver lining ; where is that 
silver lining to be discovered to-day? 

( i ) Through this War Loyalty has acquired 
an immense accession of power as a working 
force in human life. Many people who were 
not loyal before August 1914 are loyal to-day, 
and loyalty has deepened its roots in the hearts 
of those who were already loyal. 

One of the great weaknesses of our American 
life has been lack of loyalty. We have been 
deficient in team-work in our governmental, 
industrial, commercial, and professional en- 
deavors. A rampant individualism, born of 
the freedom of our environment and in keeping 
with the spacial vastness of the land in which 
we live, has played the mischief with and 
militated against our corporate opportunities. 
"Each man for himself, and the Devil take the 
hindmost" has been, unconsciously, perhaps, 
but truthfully, our working policy. 

Our loyalty is being forged afresh in the 
circumstances of this World War. At this 
moment the growth of loyalty, not only in the 



66 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

United States, but among the Allied nations 
and the nations of the Central Powers, is the 
most promising thing in human society. It 
contains the seed of a thousand spontaneous 
generations and reformations. We have more 
to hope from it that from all the plans of Re- 
construction Propagandists, and all the dis- 
quisitions of Philosophers. 

Loyalty is growing; loyalty is growing by 
leaps and bounds; and permeating the entire 
social fabric from foundation to coping stone 
it gives abundant promise of a general resur- 
rection in the better tendencies of human 
nature. From loyalty to country and to ideals 
we are going to become imbued with loyalty to 
God ; with loyalty to superiors ; with loyalty to 
friends; and with loyalty to self. The ex- 
pediency of loyalty ; the good-manneredness of 
loyalty; is to saturate our every thought, re- 
lationship, and act. The present distress is a 
small price to pay for such a permanent and 
superlative boon ! 

(2) Through this War appreciation of and 
sympathy with our fellow-men has assumed 
an unprecedented reality in the affairs of life. 

Two leagues of Nations have come into ex- 
istence, each on a greater scale than is dupli- 
cated in the past history of the world, and in 
these leagues of nations we behold a breaking 
down of the barriers which have heretofore 
divided man from man. These leagues have 



THE CLOUD AND ITS SILVER LINING 67 

been formed for the purpose of fighting one 
another it is true; but they represent an asso- 
ciation of mankind more complete, closer in 
texture, and wider in compass, than the boldest 
prognosticator would have deemed credible a 
few years ago. Just think of it — Americans, 
British, French, Italians, Serbians, Rouma- 
nians, and Japanese banded together in a com- 
mon purpose and learning to trust, and even to 
love, one another. Why, it is a stupendous 
phenomenon. It gives promise of the "Great 
Community" of the future! 

This advance in thought and practice is not 
vitiated by the fact, already stated, that the 
Central Powers and the Allies are pitted the 
one against the other. We have every reason 
to believe — and this is not a popular doctrine — 
we have every reason to believe that great re- 
vulsions of feeling will take place in the oppos- 
ing camps at the conclusion of hostilities. It 
may take some time; but the revulsion is 
bound to come. What you and I feel against 
the Germans to-day is not necessarily what you 
and I shall feel against the Germans fifteen 
years from now; nor is it what our children 
will feel in the succeeding generation. As a 
matter of fact, the stronger our feeling the 
stronger will be our ultimate revulsion of 
sentiment. 

When we think of the economic burden 
which must be borne after the restoration of 



68 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

peace, a burden so enormous that it must be 
shouldered internationally rather than nation- 
ally, this assurance of a revulsion of feeling 
between the two belligerent groups of peoples 
would seem to be emphasised. Exhausted 
credit ; depleted resources ; reduced man power ; 
shortage of food ; communities disorganized ; 
cities devastated ; fertile regions transformed 
into barren deserts; paucity of cargo-carrying 
ships — these things will bring us together on 
the side of expediency alone. These things 
can be borne only if a United World unites in 
the bearing of them. Economic ruin or Co- 
operation — these will be the vital alternatives. 
For our stomach's sake — and although man 
does not live by bread alone he does live by 
bread — we shall have to bridge over the seem- 
ingly impassable gulf between the present 
antagonistic halves of the world. The advance 
of the two sets of nations over the erstwhile 
many nations will have to develop into "a 
Federation of Nations — a Parliament of Man." 
Loyalty and Cooperation ! Twin lodestars ! 
These are two of the avatars that give shine 
through the darkness of the night. The worst 
is not all bad. Out of blackest evil there 
cometh forth, perchance — for God hath set 
the one thing over against the other — a lasting 
Good. At any rate — we are saved by hope ! 



EASTER AND THE WAR 

EASTER has come to possess a new sig- 
nificance during the past few years. It is 
one thing to contemplate the certainty of Im- 
mortality in ordinary times when the death 
rate of Humanity is maintained upon an aver- 
age scale, and it is quite another thing, so far as 
the urgency of the situation and the necessity 
of the conviction are concerned, to contemplate 
the certainty of Immortality in extraordinary 
times, when Mankind is envolved in the whirl- 
wind of death's triumphant holocaust. The 
recognition of the fact is proportioned to the 
need. 

There are several things to be said in this 
connection, and by way of elaboration : 

(i) The certainty of Immortality has be- 
come a certainty among many of the partici- 
pants in this War. 

Here is the story of a young man in active 
conflict which is illustrative of the change 
which has taken place in the hearts of the 
unbelieving soldiers of all nations since 
August, 1914. 



70 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

This young man was a member of a Yale 
contingent that went overseas under the 
auspices of the American Ambulance. On 
board ship he was celebrated for his atheistical 
conception of life. So far as he had arrived 
at any conclusions at all, for he had never 
given the subject exhaustive consideration, 
and his opinions, as a matter of fact, were in a 
state of flux, he was fully persuaded of the 
soullessness of life, and held to the idea that 
time contains its own eternity — that existence 
is limited by birth and the grave. With this 
pessimistic philosophy he combined, as a 
logical consequent, a recklessness of attitude 
toward circumstances which branded him as 
a thorough going materialist of the most ap- 
proved nineteenth century type. Lest there 
should appear to be any inconsistency between 
his professed creed and his actual practice, 
for he was a member of a corps which had to 
do with the amelioration of human suffering, 
he was careful to assert that he was going to 
the scene of hostilities in order that he might 
gratify his thirst for excitement at the fountain 
head. Such, in brief, was the mental outlook 
of this young man on the voyage across the 
ocean, and for some time after his arrival in 
France. With the course of time, however, 
there occurred, and altogether without predis- 
posing anticipation of mind, something which 
rocked the youth's superficiality of attitude to 



EASTER AND THE WAR 71 

its foundation stones. There shone about him 
a light brighter than the brightness of the sun 
at noonday, and he experienced a revolution of 
sentiment which amounted to neither more 
nor less than religious conversion. 

One day he was detailed to the bringing in of 
the wounded in No Man's Land after a heavy 
engagement which had strewn the spaces be- 
tween the intervening trenches with prostrate 
forms of the suffering and the dead. He went 
to his task courageously, and with an en- 
thusiasm which paid tribute to the dictates of 
his heart rather than to the precepts of his 
mind. He had almost completed his work, and 
was about to bring in his last man, when, as 
he covered the ground between his stationary 
ambulance and the squirming object of his 
solicitude, an enemy aeroplane overhead began 
to drop bombs, and to drop bombs fast and 
furiously. A bomb fell to right of him ; the 
young man stopped, almost dazed by the 
proximity of the concussion. Plucking up 
courage, he moved forward again. A bomb fell 
to left of him ; again the young man stopped. 
The realization that he was in the thick of 
appreciable danger swept over him in a tidal 
wave of feeling. Gathering himself together 
with the resolution born of self-respect, he 
pressed onwards once more. Two bombs fell, 
one in front of him and one behind him, churn- 
ing up the already well-churned soil in heaping 



72 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

clouds of gritty indignation. The young man 
halted irresolutely. What was he to do in this 
tornado of peril ? To walk in any direction, or 
to stand still, was equally to invite disaster. 
He cried out for help; but there was no re- 
sponse — there was nobody within helping dis- 
tance. Human assistance, even if available, 
would have been useless, worse than useless. 
An awful sense of utter loneliness engulfed him. 
He was beyond all earthly succor. The safe- 
guardings of social intercourse, so real behind 
the lines, and most active outside the zone of 
war, had no place or existence within this 
death-rimmed pit of hell. He stood alone, un- 
shackled of all intercourse with his fellows, 
altogether alone — alone with his duty. Before 
him there lay the tattered body of a pain- 
wracked soldier, turning and twisting in its 
prolonged agony, and it was his duty, his 
bounden duty, to lay hands upon that body, and 
to carry it through the rain of fire to the 
ambulance close at hand. Alone, desperately 
alone, cut off from all fellowship with his 
fellows, divorced from all succor of human 
agency, as much alone to all intents and pur- 
poses as though he and the inarticulate figure 
close at hand were the sole inhabitants of the 
universe, he stood haphazardly — an isolated 
individual face to face with death, and in the 
presence of his immediate duty ! It was then 
that, in his own words, "I lifted up my heart 



EASTER AND THE WAR 73 

to the God whom I had despised. I called upon 
Him to give me the fortitude to 'play the man/ 
and to bestow the strength which would enable 
me in the vortex of danger to perform my task. 
Suddenly, and devoid of all expectation, for 
my prayer had been a prayer of desperation 
rather than of faith, a sense of wondrous com- 
panionship engulfed me. I felt no longer that 
I stood alone. I was aware, gloriously aware, 
of a Presence that stood with me, of a Presence 
that supported me as with an angel's touch, of a 
Presence the reality of which was all suffusing 
and all comforting. God stood beside me upon 
the field of death. God companied with me upon 
the wilderness of fear. I was nerved in every 
fibre of my being, and, oblivious of all peril, 
deaf to the detonations of the falling weapons 
of destruction, I walked through that seething 
hail of flame as a man without cowardice and 
without reproach. I did my duty unhesitat- 
ingly, and, rescuing my fallen brother, I left 
the scene of chaos for the regions of peace and 
safety. Since that day, nay, since that hour, 
I have never doubted the existence of God, and, 
in that God lives, I have never questioned the 
dignity of human life, nor the assurance of 
further life beyond the confines of this present 
life." 

This realization of Immortality, this con- 
fidence of the Easter Hope, has come to count- 
less thousands of the soldiers who are fighting 



74 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

in this present War. Confronted with the 
King of Terrors, the King has lost his terror 
through the experience of his closeness, and 
through the sight of the expression of unex- 
pected benevolence upon his age-seamed face. 
Death has lost its sting, and the grave has been 
shorn, palpably shorn, of its victory. Men 
have seen life steadily, and they have seen it 
whole. The details have been lost in the 
panorama; a panorama which includes to-day 
and the everlasting to-morrow within its scope. 
Death has become an episode, merely the 
bridging between one set of experiences and 
another set of experiences, and men have 
learned the humor which is able to laugh in 
the presence of death and to treat it as the 
heartfelt jest of the everliving soul. 

(2) The certainty of Immortality has be- 
come a certainty among the home populations 
of all the warring lands : The conversions of 
the Battle Field are not, in point of numbers, 
to be mentioned in the same breath with the 
conversions of the relatives and friends of those 
who have fallen in this bloody War. They are 
counted in the hundreds of thousands, and they 
constitute, in their significance, a well-nigh 
universal Pentecost of Humanity. 

To the American people, who are, as yet, but 
entering the War, and to whom the weekly 
casualty list running into the tens of thousands 
is unknown, this increase of faith in the funda- 



EASTER AND THE WAR 75 

mental doctrine of the Christian Religion is 
relatively unappreciated. It is a fact which has 
to be experienced to be realized. Even obser- 
vation is powerless to produce the requisite 
impression of its truth. People do not mourn 
in public; they mourn in private. People do 
not wear their griefs upon their sleeves; 
they conceal their griefs within the inner- 
most recesses of their hearts. There is a 
delicacy, there is a refinement, there is a 
jealous safe-guarding, about bereavement 
which forbids all vulgar ostentation, and which 
precludes the advertisement which comes of 
shoutings upon the house tops. The mourners 
of France and of the British Empire and of 
Italy and of all the Allied countries and the 
countries of the Central Powers are weeping 
in secret, in the quietness of unhampered and 
invulnerable seclusion — even whilst they front 
the world with brave faces from which all 
traces of tears have been wiped away. 

The fact of the matter, however, is this : In 
the hearts of the prepondering majority of 
those who have lost their dear ones in this War 
— and this is a recognition experienced by 
those who have passed through the waters of 
affliction, and, also, by those who have been 
privileged to enter into another's grief — there 
is an assurance of Immortality based upon the 
very necessities of the case, and founded upon 
the self-conscious possession of a peace that 



76 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

passeth all understanding. The stricken 
mother, the desolated wife, the fatherless child, 
and the saddened friend, have faced, under the 
spur of demand, the age-long question, "If a 
man die, shall he live again"? and they have 
reached a ground of conviction as compared 
with which their previous certainty was as 
evanescent predilection. No longer do they 
hope, or suppose, or prefer — they know, know 
beyond peradventure, know beyond the possi- 
bility of mistake. Their whole philosophy of 
conduct, their whole courage in the presence 
of unending calamity, is based upon the per- 
sonal testimony, "I believe in the resurrection 
of the dead, and the life of the world to come." 
Henceforth, for them, Life temporal leads on 
to Life eternal, and Earth is but the vestibule 
of Heaven, and those who are asleep in Christ 
are alive with Christ, and hereafter He and they 
shall be associated together forever in the 
Father's Presence. 

"The War and Easter." Why, who could 
endure to contemplate the War without 
Easter? An Easterless War! A War such as 
this, with its slain running into the millions, 
with barely a family untouched with sorrow 
in those lands whose peoples have been en- 
gaged in conflict for four years, without the 
historical fact of the Resurrection of Jesus 
Christ from the dead! A War, the fields 



EASTER AND THE WAR 77 

of which are strewn with buried and un- 
buried carcasses — stretching two in a row 
and touching one another all the way from 
New York to San Francisco — with no hope 
beyond the visible, and with no expecta- 
tion outside of the tangible and concrete ! A 
War which has peopled the vasty deeps of the 
seas and oceans of the world with bleached and 
inanimate, with floating and sunken bodies, 
until the legitimate inhabitants of the waters 
are swimmingly amazed at the persistent in- 
vasion of the unfamiliar dead of the human 
species, without the Alleluias of those who 
have "washed their robes and made them white 
in the Blood of The Lamb !" A War which 
uses men as fodder for the cannons, blasting 
them into infinitesimal fragments of disorgan- 
ized atoms, until the graves of the air are as 
numerous as, if not more numerous than, the 
burial places of the land, without the verifiable 
fact that one Man burst aside the impediments 
of the grave as a giant would toss aside the 
playthings of a child, and that that one Man is 
the Lord of the Earth, the Sea, and the Sky! 
What an overwhelming thought; what a 
devastating conception ; what an all exceeding 
calamity; too appaling, too searchingly and 
harrowingly awful, for the restrained insanity 
of the mind of man to visualize. 

****** 
"The War, and Easter." That makes a 



78 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

world of difference. That makes all the dif- 
ference. In such a Faith we may believe that 
Heaven is full of youthful life, growing eter- 
nally young in the Presence of the Giver of all 
life, and that the atmosphere of Heaven is 
vibrant with the triumph songs of those who, 
"having fought a good fight, now rest from 
their labors." 



WOMEN AND THE WAR 

I WANT to speak to the women of to-day 
and I want to speak to them upon some 
phases of Women's Duty in connection with 
the War. 

(i) You must be patriotic Americans. I 
understand some of the difficulties inherent in 
the conception of Patriotism in the Twentieth 
Century. Some of us have come to regard 
ourselves as members of the human race rather 
than as citizens of a particular country ; to look 
upon the men of all nations as the fellow- 
children of a common God. Internationalism, 
however, has not, as yet, arrived, and until it 
does arrive I believe that in striking the note 
of patriotism I am striking the note of God. 

The love of country ought to come naturally 
to an American. The Jew said, "If I forget 
thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget 
her cunning." But the Jew had less to go upon 
than has the American. Palestine was a 
beautiful land ; but the United States, in its ex- 
pansive variety, is far more beautiful ; taken all 
in all it is the most beautiful country in the 



80 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

world. But, more than this : America is the 
home of Freedom. Equality and Fraternity 
are our watchwords ; proclaimed in the sacrifice 
of our forefathers, and actualized in the practice 
of our modern life. In this country the individ- 
ual is borne and nurtured in liberty, and in 
this country the foreigner from the four 
quarters of the earth may achieve a personal 
destiny qualified only by his personal capacity. 
Still more than this : For the first time since 
the Civil War, America is in peril. Make no 
mistake about that. We stand in the tightest 
corner that we have stood in since the War of 
Independence. If we win this War, we gain 
peace, in all likelihood, for at least one hundred 
years. If we lose this War, America, to all 
intents and purposes, will be a German prov- 
ince. The purity of our homes will be in- 
vaded ; what happened to Belgium women and 
children may happen to us; and life will not 
be worth the living. 

For the beauty of America, for the Freedom 
of America, and for the safety of America, 
American women must be patriotic. 

(2) Through your patriotism you must be 
self-sacrificing Americans. You must stir up 
and encourage the noble instinct of your hus- 
bands, sons, and brothers. That instinct which 
makes them want to go out and stand up for 
their country in this day of need. Some women 
have encouraged their menfolk to answer the 



WOMEN AND THE WAR 81 

call to arms, and some women have not! I 
have heard of one woman who told her husband 
that if he went to the War she would have 
nothing more to do with him — that he would 
not find her on his return ! Some mothers are, 
surreptitiously or openly, holding their boys 
back, Some wives are, speciously or plainly, 
deterring their husbands from their obvious 
duty. The draft law, with its age and family 
requirements, is sometimes a splendid fence to 
hide behind. 

I do not suggest for a moment that each 
case is not to be decided upon in accordance 
with its individual merits ; nor that enrollment 
in the fighting forces of the nation is the only, 
nor necessarily the best, manner in which a 
man may assist his country in the hour of need. 
But, I do imply that a woman, whatever the 
sacrifice involved, should clear, so far as pos- 
sible, the road along which a man would walk 
in doing his patriotic and humanitarian duty. 
You must be brave enough, self-sacrificing 
enough, to brace yourself cheerfully, and say, 
"Go ; go, Beloved, if go you must ; and my love 
and pride go with you." 

(3) Through your Patriotism and your self- 
sacrifice you must learn to love your enemies. 

This is not popular doctrine ; but it is the right 
sort of doctrine for a minister of Christ to 
preach ! However much I abhor the methods 
of the Germans I am not going to let the 



82 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

Germans cause me to break away from my 
religion. 

We must remember that the average German 
person has only his own "White Book" to read. 
That White Book leaves out several important 
letters and telegrams which the rest of the 
civilized world has read. The average German 
person is convinced that Russia started the 
War. He believes beyond preadventure that 
Russia forced this War upon Germany. The 
ordinary German mother, therefore, sends out 
her boy with the same love and pride with 
which an American mother sends out her boy. 
She tells him to fight, as in God's sight, for the 
Fatherland. 

When you think over these things — appre- 
ciating the fact that this cataclysm is too big a 
thing to end in indelible hate — remember One 
who forgave His enemies, aye, and tried to help 
them ! It is one of the hardest things we have 
to do, to preach this forgiveness of the Hun, 
and to live out the preaching in daily life. As 
Christians, however, this must be our attitude, 
and nothing else. 

(4) Through your Patriotism, your self- 
sacrifice, and your effort to forgive your en- 
emies, you must keep alive the religious spirit 
during wartime. You must attend as many of 
the services of the Church as possible. You 
must by your example (and example is ever 



WOMEN AND THE WAR 83 

better than word) encourage people to turn to 
God in this Gethsemane of the world. 

It is simply astounding, when you really 
come to think about it, that people should ap- 
parently need God less amid the thunder of 
1918 than they did in the seeming sunshine of 
the months prior to August, 1914! The de- 
mand for comfort is unprecedented in the his- 
tory of the world, and yet the Comforter is not 
enthroned in the hearts of men ! The request 
for Light amid the darkness is altogether un- 
paralleled since the Cry of Christ on Calvary, 
and yet the radiant illumination of Him who is 
the Light of the World is not overwhelmingly 
sought ! 

The causes are manifold. Doubt has beset 
the strongholds of faith, and, preeminently, 
work has ousted worship. 

Now, you women, you Christian women, 
must be sane. You must seek inspiration for 
your service in prayer ; dynamic for your public 
duties in public worship. In working for man 
you must seek the help of God, and in striving 
after the salvation of the world you must pay 
systematical homage to the world's King. 

Let us, then, follow after Patriotism ; Self- 
sacrifice ; Forgiveness ; and Religion ; that 
through the love of Country, the love of 
Humanity, the love of our Enemies, and the 
love of God, we may rise to the level of our 
opportunities in this Day of the Lord. 



A WOMAN WAR WORKER 

THE women workers of England to-day- 
compose an army ; both in numbers and in 
their sense of patriotic duty. As Railway 
Porters, as Buss Conductors, as Motor Chauf- 
feurs, as Lorrie Drivers, as Military Nurses, 
and as a hundred and one other things — they 
are to be met with everywhere. Their looks, 
their ages, and their uniforms are differ- 
entiated; but they are united in a common 
determination to assist the manhood of the 
country in the winning of the war. 

If it is the merest platitude to assert that the 
Salvation Army, the Young Men's Christian 
Association, and similar organizations, have 
reaped a golden harvest of usefulness in the 
face of the extraordinary opportunities of 
present-day affairs — adapting their inherent 
geniuses to the enlarging necessities of un- 
toward crisis — it is equally true to say that 
woman has measured up to the uttermost re- 
quirements of the past four blood-tinged years, 
and that she has come into her everlasting 
"own"; a factor, appreciated and approved, 



A WOMAN WAR WORKER 85 

in the business of society, never again to be 
discredited. 

3j* 5jC 3JC 5p 3jC 3JC 

Here is a concrete account of what one 
woman is doing in the accomplishment of her 
"bit" — suggestive of the self-sacrificing efforts 
of thousands of her sisters : 

Whilst sitting one day in a Y. M. C. A. Hut 
in one of the Canadian camps in England word 
was brought to me that a woman wished to 
speak to me. As I was unaware of a woman 
acquaintance in the district I was, to say the 
least, astonished at the tidings. I went out- 
side the building fully convinced that some 
error, or misjudgment, was responsible for 
the unlooked-for tidings. Imagine my amaze- 
ment to discover seated upon the high perched 
driving board of a heavy army motor truck, 
correctly booted and coated, a long lost female 
cousin ! She had heard indirectly of my 
presence in the camp, and, as we had not met 
for many years — as a matter of fact since she 
was a small girl in pinafores, and I a blushing 
bridegroom of tender years — she had deter- 
mined to seek me out. 

"Jump in," said the khakied paragon of war, 
"mother and I live not far from here, and you 
are coming home to dine with us, and to spend 
the night." 

Being a "mere man," and a junior officer at 
that, I obeyed the command with an alacrity 



86 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

which spoke well for my sense of discipline, 
and, indirectly, for my appreciation of good 
fortune at the unexpected meeting. 

I clambered up to the alpine heights of her 
isolated presence, and, with an inward thank- 
fulness for an insurance premium both due and 
paid, trusted my precious person, and the 
ecstatic happiness of my parishioners across 
the seas, to her lorried skill. 

"Who are you," I said, "looking so serried 
bold at one score years ; and what is this armor 
plated vehicle which, in defiance of the laws of 
decency and sex, you so deftly manipulate ?" 

"I, sir," she coyly answered, "I, sir, am your 
humble cousin to obey ; Motor Driver Number 
31 ; a salaried servant of His Gracious Majesty 
the King; and this gigantic beast, steel proof 
and tire hardened, upon whose throttle rests 

my maiden hand, is the Wash Van of W 

Camp." 

It was altogether true! My esteemed and 
girlish cousin, delicate of form and fair of face, 
the animated and advanced recollection of my 
boyhood's dreams, a daughter of luxury and a 
sensitized lady to her finger tips, was engaged 
in the supposedly menial task of gathering in 
and returning the daily wash of the soldiers 
of an English military camp ! 

The significant fact was that this remarkable 
thing which she was doing was not at all re- 
markable to her, was accepted as a matter of 



A WOMAN WAR WORKER 87 

course, as quite unworthy of exceptional com- 
ment, as, indeed, in the nature of a glorious 
privilege, and that it was being done by gently 
nurtured women throughout the length and 
breadth of England ! 

Will the women of America arise to a height 
of sacrifice such as this, and, forging their 
vanity afresh in the furnace of their country's 
necessity, play the unself-consciously conse- 
crated part which the exigencies of this history 
freighted hour so clamorously demand ? 

To ask the question — an impertinence in it- 
self — is to answer it. What women have done, 
and are doing, anywhere, women may accom- 
plish everywhere. For womanhood is indig- 
enous to itself ; of the same innate quality, and 
instinctive fibre, beneath the far-warming rays 
of the expansive sun. 



GREAT BRITAIN'S EFFORT 

WE worked for peace," declared Sir Edward 
Grey on August 3, 1914, in the House of 
Commons, "up to the last moment ; and beyond 
the last moment, we worked for Peace." Any 
reader of the British White Book, and any 
student of British unpreparedness, will ap- 
preciate, beyond peradventure, the unqualified 
truth of this statement. The rejection of these 
peace efforts by Germany, combined with the 
moral issue of the invasion of Belgium, brought 
into the War the full passion and weight of the 
British Empire. The patent evidence of these 
peace efforts, disputed in their integrity by no 
unbiased observer, won the general confidence 
of the neutral peoples of the World in the 
honesty of Britain's purpose. By a colossal 
paradox the far flung population of England 
and her Colonies as they read Sir Edward 
Grey's words were at once stunned and re- 
lieved beyond measure. They stood to lose the 
whole world — but not their soul ! 

Immediately the ranks of the country closed. 
The Civil War that threatened Ireland was 



GREAT BRITAIN'S EFFORT 89 

stilled ; the Suffrage party turned their energies 
into national war organizations; and Capital 
and Labor joined hands in a glowing concen- 
tration against the Bully of mankind. Without 
hysteria, and devoid of all manifestations of 
riotous joy, silently, and with a quietness that 
perturbed friend and foe alike, a United Empire 
dedicated itself to the cause of humanity — to 
the last man and the last penny. The British 
fleet steamed to its stations ; mobilization was 
ordered; Lord Kitchener was appointed min- 
ister of war; and some 90,000 men and four 
hundred guns — "England's Contemptible 
Army" — were despatched to France. 

When the British Expeditionary Force 
landed in Europe, Belgium and France had 
been fighting Germany for ten days. The 
German Legions were trying to "hack their 
way through". To attempt to recall the story 
of the Teutonic doings in Belgium would be to 
chronicle the incredible, and, at the same time, 
to overreach the bounds of the purpose I have 
in mind. It is enough to suggest that every- 
thing that we deemed secure among civilized 
men was defiled and destroyed — fidelity to 
pledged word, reverence for age, the sanctity of 
womanhood, standards of honor, of justice, and 
clean fighting. A deliberate policy of "fright- 
fulness" was carried out to inspire a terror 
that would paralyze resistance. The Germans 
lacked elementary brain power in ultimate 



90 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

things, and proved that they had left out of 
count the soul of the world. The immediate 
sequel is, perhaps, the greatest miracle of 
modern times. The heroic Belgians hampered 
the giant's stride across their small-sized king- 
dom, and left the Gideon's band of the British 
Expeditionary Force to fend the blow of five 
German army corps. The English soldiers, 
fighting with unsurpassable gallantry, and un- 
supported and outnumbered, withdrew to the 
south and the west until the historic line-up be- 
tween the Marne and Paris was an accom- 
plished fact. 

At that hour the universe stood upon the tip 
toe of suspense, and held its breath. The 
French took the Germans on the flank and won 
the battle of Grand Couronne. Von Kluck 
swerved to the centre, and the Allies were 
locked in a deadly wrestle with the German 
hordes. The decisive hour of the ages had 
struck, and God stepped into the fray to save 
the cause of righteousness and civilization. 
The Teutonic grip relaxed, and the armies of 
the Central Powers turned their backs upon the 
Paris which lay so near at hand, and yet alto- 
gether beyond their reach. The supernatural 
had its innings, and Providence saved the Day. 
The Allied advance began. The Entente had 
fought for and secured time. It remained to 
use that time to the full compass of the event. 



We come now to the transformation of 



GREAT BRITAIN'S EFFORT 91 

Britain. Behind the thin line of tested steel in 
Flanders and France, and behind the protection 
of her navy, Great Britain began that adapta- 
tion of her life which stands without parallel in 
history. The truth of her unpreparedness, 
greater in degree than any other nation in- 
volved in the War, necessitated a social, in- 
dustrial, and political revolution that went to 
the very roots of her national being. 

There was the personal dedication of life. 

Over five million men voluntarily enlisted for 
service before conscription came into force. 
This has been the greatest religious act in Brit- 
ish history. The universities emptied them- 
selves, as it were, over-night. Students who 
lived for the increase of knowledge went out 
to endure fatigues, to command men, and to 
rattle the dice with death. The unanimity of 
self-sacrifice was not limited to any class or 
type. Laboring men, business men, profes- 
sional men poured in in their thousands, and 
hundreds of thousands, until the enlistments 
of a single day surpassed the pre- War enroll- 
ment of a year. The flood of men literally 
overwhelmed the military machinery of the 
country. When the news from Flanders was 
at its worst enlistment was at its best. 

Less conspicuous than the self-offering of the 
men, although as striking and complete, was 
the self-offering of the women. Women from 
every walk of life, rich and poor, aristocratic 



92 The religion of the tommy 

and plebeian, exchanged the domesticities and 
the dainties of existence for the farm, the 
factory, the shop, and the mine. They manned 
the railway trains, the munition plants, the 
motor cars, the street conveyances, the dock- 
yards, and the hospitals. They began a work 
which they have continued in ever increasing 
output — the providing of their armies Over 
Seas with guns, and shells, and cartridges, and 
food; without which their armies would cease 
to be operative within a week. It is not too 
much to say that the women of the mother- 
land and the colonies have been responsible for 
the production of the sinews of war, and so for 
the laudable perpetuation of the crucial conflict 
up to the present hour. 

Next to the personal dedication of life there 
has been the transformation in the mechanical 
and industrial element — the reconstruction that 
has made of Britain one vast armament factory. 
At the beginning of the War there were 
three ammunition plants, and a few private 
auxiliary firms. In the spring of 1917 the 
capacity for producing high explosives was 
twenty-eight times as great as in the spring 
of 191 5. At the moment of speaking it is al- 
most forty times as great ! The supply of aero- 
planes has been doubled every six months! 
The annual output of British steel has risen 
from seven million tons to ten million, and is 
still increasing ! These guns and this ammuni- 



GREAT BRITAIN'S EFFORT 93 

tion roar, and these aeroplanes fly, over the 
Italian and the French fronts, in the Balkans 
and in Palestine, on the banks of the Tigris and 
in the jungles of Africa! It is a story of 
achievement which in detail baffles the imagi- 
nation of man. In technical preparedness 
Britain has accomplished about as much in 
four years as Germany accomplished in forty 
years ! We sometimes hear the question asked, 
"What is Britain doing in the War?" The 
answer is "What is she not doing?" Her navy, 
with its personnel increased from 136,000 to 
400,000, has swept the seas free of the enemy 
on the surface, and is at incessant war upon the 
enemy beneath the sea. Her fleet has kept 
open the channels of communication between 
the hemispheres, and safeguarded the trans- 
portation of supplies without which Germany 
would have triumphed in a few months. Her 
armies hold the enemy in three continents, and 
on five fronts, and are cooperating with the 
Allies on two others. Her women have uncom- 
plainingly flung aside the happy preoccupations 
of peace, and have given themselves without 
stint to successful labor. 

Her whole industrial life has been revolu- 
tionized, and she has poured out her wealth for 
the Allied effort to the extent of thousands of 
millions of pounds sterling. 

She has cast into the breach for the freedom 
of the world her heart, her head, her hands, 



94 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

and her soul. Verily ! what has she not done ; 
what is she not doing ; what is she not yet pre- 
pared to do? 



Mrs. Humphrey Ward, two years ago, or 
more, wrote a book, "England's Effort." The 
book was excellent; but the title was a mis- 
nomer; for the Service of England has been 
the Service of the Empire. 

"Can you think of the British Empire," cried 
Burke, "without a Sursum Corda?" If Burke 
felt like that in his day, how must we lift up our 
hearts at the thought of the British Empire in 
this time in which we live! Since 1914 there 
has been the flaming response of a world-wide 
hegemony of nations to the need of the Mother 
Country. The men from the Dominions, the 
Crown Colonies, and the Dependency of India, 
have proved themselves to be sons, not sub- 
jects, of the home-land. 

There were those who said before this War, 
preeminently the Germanic peoples, that the tie 
of Empire was loose; that the strands were 
strands of silk, and that they would snap in the 
day of strain. The opposite has been dis- 
covered to be the case. The strands have 
proved to be stronger than the iron bands of 
Germany. "The hammer of Thor", it has been 
aptly said, "in the hands of the Teuton has 
welded the Empire's noble metal into a single 
sword of tempered steel." 



GREAT BRITAIN'S EFFORT 95 

The call of the great adventure for the de- 
fence of the Empire, for the freedom of small 
nations, had no sooner sounded than every 
province of the Empire sprang to arms. Eng- 
lish and Boers, Scots and Canadians, Irish and 
Indians, Australians and New Zealanders, men 
of Newfoundland and Africa, and the peoples 
of the Islands of the seas, offered, willingly and 
lovingly offered, their possessions and their 
lives. Within eight weeks of the declaration of 
War Canada had concentrated, equipped, and 
embarked a voluntary Army of 33,000 men — 
the largest force that had ever crossed the 
Atlantic at one time. These were the men who 
bore the brunt of the first diabolical gas attack ; 
the men whom Lord French praised in his 
official dispatch as having averted disaster 
through their magnificent display of bravery. 
That original force has been raised to approx- 
imately 500,000 men ! Neuve Chapelle, Ypres, 
Festubert, Givenchy, Vimy Ridge, and other 
battles, testify to Canada's part in the conflict. 

The same story, in different words and in 
varying totals, may be written of Newfound- 
land, whose regiment won its hill top nearer 
Constantinople than any other regiment in the 
tragic experiment of Gallipoli; of Australia, 
which has contributed an army almost as large 
as the whole army of Great Britain during the 
South African War; of New Zealand, whose 
heroic troops, together with the troops of the 



% THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

neighboring Commonwealth, created and bap- 
tized in blood a new name that stands for the 
most glorious heroism of the War, the name 
"Anzac", which shall be mentioned with kind- 
ling eye so long as history lasts; of South 
Africa, whose army of some 60,000 men con- 
quered an area of territory comprising a third 
of a million square miles, and then garrisoned 
the country; of India whose reciprocity reads 
like an Arabian Night's romance, and whose 
native rulers offered their services with oriental 
lavishness; and of the Island outposts of the 
oceans of the world which gave, and gave 
abundantly, in proportion to their means. 

It is all a superb epic of spontaneous loyalty 
which has caused the acrimonious critics of 
England's colonizing policies to falsify their 
past impressions, and to grudgingly acknowl- 
edge that the Empire of Great Britain is an 
actuality in fact and not a figment of the imagi- 
nation. 



Such in brief, in briefest brief, is, and has 
been, Great Britain's effort in this War. To 
include in detail within the panorama, to fill 
in the names and places upon the outline map, 
to attempt to paint the picture rather than to 
sketch the sketch, would be to expand a 
chapter into a book, and to multiply the book 
into almost endless volumes. The truth is, and 
this is an assertion that no thinking and un- 



GREAT BRITAIN'S EFFORT 97 

prejudiced person may gainsay, that Britain's 
resistance to the oppressor, her military and 
naval and financial and moral resistance, has so 
far saved humanity from a virtual slavery, a 
slavery worse than death, and prevented that 
"damned thing which is in the saddle in Ger- 
many from riding mankind with bit, and bridle, 
and bloody spurs." France has been wonder- 
ful; Italy has been splendid; Serbia and Rou- 
mania have done their share; Russia, so long 
as she retained her corporate entity, has been 
a source of strength ; Japan has, so far as per- 
mitted, played a self-sacrificing part ; the record 
of the United States is and will be a glorious 
record ; but without the stamina, and the back- 
bone, and the bulldog tenacity, and the indom- 
itable courage of Great Britain, the War would 
have been over a long time since, and the 
sun of freedom have been eclipsed forever in 
the Heavens. 



A VISIT TO F 



THE Canadian Chaplains' Service has done 
an extraordinarily effective work since the 
beginning of the War — so effective, in fact, 
that it takes rank with the remarkable per- 
formances of the Canadian Army as a whole. 
When the story of Canada's contribution to the 
Empire is written at the conclusion of hostili- 
ties, the record of the achievement of the 
Chaplains' Service will take its place with a 
corporate military attainment which has aston- 
ished no class of people more than it has aston- 
ished Canadians themselves. 

It was my good fortune to be a friend of 
some years' standing of Colonel Almond, C. 
M. G., the Director of the Canadian Chaplains' 
Service, and through such an instrumentality 
to be superficially initiated into the scope of the 
work accomplished by his department. It was 
also my good fortune to know many of the 
chaplains individually, and so to be able to sub- 
stantiate the account of their splendid and 
heroic usefulness in time of War by my 



A VISIT TO F 99 

knowledge of their unusual qualifications in 
time of peace. 

I called upon Colonel Almond in London, 
and, as always, found his personality most 
attractive and inspiring. He is a man of un- 
usual "force" ; of great ability as an organizer 
and administrator; most thorough in plan and 
execution; and an unflinching exponent of 
Common Sense Christianity from the view 
point of "the man in the street." He has done 
a fine piece of creative work in his present 
position ; organizing order out of chaos ; which, 
together with his record in France, should 
make him a revered figure for all time in the 
Canadian Church. 

Colonel Almond has considerably more than 
two hundred chaplains under his direction and 
control, in England, in France, and in Mace- 
donia; and, as guiding force, he is ministering 
to the spiritual welfare of from four to five 
hundred thousand soldiers. He has associated 
with him the cream of the denominational 
Canadian ministry; such as Canons Shatford 
and Scott, and Major MacGreer; and by his 
justice, finally tempered with mercy, has won 
the hearty respect of his temporary sub- 
ordinates. 

I spent a never-to-be-forgotten day with 
Colonel Almond, and I should like to tell my 
readers something about it. 



100 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

We set out from London in the middle of a 
bright September morning, in a Government 
car, with a competent woman chauffeur. Our 
journey lay through the fascinating lanes and 
hamlets of Kent — with highlands on one side of 
us, and the neighboring farmlands, stretching 
down to the sparkling waters of the Channel, 
on the other side of us. The sun, resplendent 
in the heavens, cast shadow and light upon 
well-kept hedge, miniature mountain, and 
shallow dell. 

We raced along, with all the superiority in 
demeanor of the privileged, at the rate of forty 
miles an hour. Motor lorries, groups of 
soldiers, tented encampments by the wayside, 
and hurtling aeroplanes over our heads, 
together with passing staff cars, carried the 
sense of the unusual into the rural wonderland 
of our hastening progress. Before reaching 

F , our destination, we skirted along the 

shores of the English Channel, in full sight 
of the shimmering cliffs of France in the 
pellucid distances, and here and there caught 
a glimpse of observation craft poised in mid 
air, and waiting for the smallest indication of 
mauraudirig submarine. 

There are, as every one has experienced, 
days which seem to gather up all days, past 
and future, into their focussed circumference, 
and to shed their recollection over the vista of 
the years — red letter days upon the calendar 



A VISIT TO F 101 

of the black letter days of human life; days 
when merely to be alive is sufficient price to 
pay for the recurrent monotonies of existence. 
Such a day was this ; in its beauty and novelty 
a day to be remembered when other and lesser 
days have vanished into the limbo of forgotten 
things. Mood and scenery, glorious weather 
and the atmosphere of war, all combined to 
canonize this day — to me at any rate — as a day 
of days, a day tabulated and within recall 
forever. 

At S Camp we saw the canvassed 

abiding place of some twenty-five thousand 
Canadian troops; the majority of the men in 
final preparation for the fields of France; the 
individual tents smeared with color to mislead 
the eyes of offending German aircraft; and 
hurried past the ranks of several brigades upon 
the march. We went directly to the offices 
of the senior chaplain, Major Wilson, and were 
soon, myself as onlooker and my companion as 
principal participant, immersed in "affairs of 
state !" 

It was a conference especially war-time in 
its peculiar circumstances; a conference be- 
tween a man who in "real life" is a High 
Church Anglican and a man who in normal 
times is a Methodist minister! It was a con- 
ference carried on in the best and most 
mutually understanding spirit imaginable — 
the Methodist appreciating the authority and 



102 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

executive wisdom of his military superior, and 
the Anglican deferring time and again to the 
opinion of his strictly pious confrere! It was 
a juxtaposition interesting to a degree — as sug- 
gestive of the true catholicity of atmosphere 
which may, perhaps, be wrought out in this 
season of crisis to bless the Church of Christ 
for all seasons to come. It was indicative of 
the harmonious eclecticism of the Chaplains' 
Service at large — for ministers of every Church 
and Denomination, Roman Catholics, Presby- 
terians, Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans, and 
all the rest are working in love and without 
friction in the same organization, and under 
the same control. Surely, Church Unity is 
becoming something more than a dream, and 
is descending, or ascending, into the realm of 
practical politics; a tangible something to be 
dealt with to the best interests of all concerned 
when once more "the lion shall lie down with 
the lamb, and a little child shall lead" the forces 
of humanity. If men are able to do this sort 
of thing under the stress of unusual demand, 
in days of war, and to do it in brotherly affec- 
tion for the Master's sake, shall they not be 
able to do it, with equal forbearance and rating 
of one another's worth, in days of peace, when 
the demand, although less spectacular in sem- 
blance, is intrinsically one and the same ? The 
practical hope for such a Godsend is to be dis- 
covered here — that these chaplains, representa- 



A VISIT TO F 103 

tive men of their Churches in Canada, and their 
spheres of work stretching from the Atlantic 
to the Pacific, are some day to return home 
again, and to carry back with them the vision 
of what has been done within their own ex- 
perience. Will they rest satisfied with the 
partisanship — with what one might call the 
the picayunism — of the past, and be perma- 
nently content with the smallness of thought 
which finds residence within home sectarian- 
ism ? Surely not ! They have learned a lesson 
which they will never forget — a Christlike 
lesson — and they will translate their instruc- 
tion into the "lengthening of the cords and the 
strengthening of the stakes" of their home 
constituencies. Then — behold the day of great 
things ! 

I must confess that in this interview I had 
an insight into the necessary soullessness of 
the "job" of a spiritual executive — how men 
must be promoted or demoted not in accord- 
ance with their desire, but in league with their 
approved capacity — which made me grateful 
for the fact that no man is able to make a 
man a Bishop against his will and determina- 
tion ! The man — so naturally important to 
himself, and so manifestly a subject for special 
treatment on grounds of sentiment — has, in the 
Church as elsewhere, to be regarded as a mere 
cog in a tremendous machine, and to be moved 
where, and only where, his individual services 



104 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

are best calculated to effect beneficially the 
success of the movement as a whole. Ledg- 
ered Christianity, with its debit and its credit 
side, alone weighs in the nicely freighted 
balances of the passionless Director of Chap- 
lain's Service. And, it is right that such 
should be the case. 

I thought on this thing as the twilight 
gathered, when the time came to return, and 
when the darkened streets of London burst 
once more apologetically upon our view, and 
I came to the conclusion that, when all is said 
and done, efficiency is a cold-blooded German, 
and with armor over his stony heart! The 
world would be a much pleasanter place were 
there a royal road to preferment, were each 
man to be taken at his own valuation, and 
were Tipperary not quite so far away. Which 
things are an allegory — and for the reader to 
translate. 



A VISIT TO S CAMP 

I SPENT some days at the Headquarters of 
the Y. M. C. A. for the S area in 

F In the same house with me were 

the supervisor of the work in this district, his 
executive assistant, and a fellow-evangelist, 
Captain W. R. Cameron, of Toronto, who has 
done extraordinarily effective work with the 
Canadian troops in England and France. It 
was, from the side of companionship alone, a 
most happy experience, and from the point of 
view of the purposes for which I went over 
seas, an educative visit. 

S , one of the largest, if not the largest, 

and most important of the Canadian camps 
in England, is situated over a scattered ter- 
ritory ranging from one and a half miles to 

eight miles from the city of F , so well 

known as one of the best patronized water- 
ing places in England, and extensively used 
in these war times as a point of embarkation 
for France. It is divided into a series of en- 
campments, S proper, St. Martin's Plain, 

Dibgate, East Sandling, and West Sandling, 



106 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

Otterpool, Monks Horton, and Sandgate. 
There have been as many as fifty thousand 
soldiers in residence in these different places 
at one time — soldiers recently arrived from 
Canada and on their way to the battle fields 
of France, invalided soldiers from the Western 
Front and elsewhere, and, in the rest camps, 
soldiers returning from temporary leave in 
England on their way across the neighboring 
channel. 

At S I had the pleasure of meeting 

an old friend, Captain Woodcock, of the chap- 
lains' service ; the rector of the Church of Eng- 
land in Oakville, Ontario. Under his fostering 
care I was shown about the camp with a 
thoroughness which could leave nothing to be 
desired by the most enthusiastic and voracious 
pilgrim. We inspected the Officers' Barracks 
and the Barracks for soldiers — the latter an 
innumerable collection of solidly constructed 
huts arranged in rows and fronting narrow 
street-ways; the several hospitals, differen- 
tiated and graded in their minstrations ; the 
Garrison church, where the parade services of 
the Church of England are held on Sundays, 
together with frequent celebrations of the Holy 
Communion, and a Sunday school for the chil- 
dren of the vicinity ; and the graveyard of 
Canadians who, far away from their native land 
and kinsfolk, have perished during the past 
three years from disease, or German air raids. 
It was an interesting tour — interesting, and 



A VISIT TO S CAMP 107 

enlightening, in every sense of the words — for 
to the topographical features there was added 
the prevailing presence of marching companies 
of men on every hand, and the whirring sound 
of air craft over our heads — many of them 
aeroplanes on their flight to the fields of 
Flanders, which at the speed which they were 
travelling, would, I was informed, be reached 
within the compass of an hour or less. 

I was privileged to mess with the cavalry 
officers in Somerset Barracks — a group of men 
of whom Canada, trusting her reputation to 
their keeping, has every reason to be proud — 
and was fortunate enough to meet several 
friends whom I had known in Hamilton and 
elsewhere in times of peace. The economy of 
war has entered into the abiding places of our 
fighting men even as it has assailed the homes 
of the civilian population in England; for, at 
Somerset Barracks we regaled in margerine in 
lieu of butter, and sugar was an absent luxury 
— provided, in accordance with regulations, 
only at breakfast and dinner. The atmosphere 
of the dining room, as indeed, the atmosphere 
of the entire building, was a fragrant reminder 
of one's college days, when stewards presided 
over the daily menage, and when the dainty 
touch of woman's hand was conspicuous by its 
absence! 

At S , as in all other camps which 

are blessed with their presence, the chaplains 



108 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

are performing a service of love, which is as 
much appreciated by the men who come under 
its beneficent influences as it is comparatively- 
unknown, at any rate in its intensive scope, by 
the rank and file of Canadian people in the 
homeland. Here are ministers and priests of 
all denominations and hailing from every part 
of the Dominion of Canada, who have left their 
families and their important parishes thousands 
of miles behind them to serve, unostentatiously 
and faithfully and in the spirit of the Christ, 
fellow-countrymen, the preponderating ma- 
jority of whom they have never seen before, 
exiled, temporarily but realistically, from the 
old scenes and the familiar faces which alone 
make life enduringly worth while. These 
chaplains have voluntarily subjected them- 
selves to military discipline, and entered a 
system of life altogether divorced from their 
previous experience — signing up, most of 
them, for the "duration of the war" — in 
order that they may "play the game" and 
"do their bit" in the untoward tragedy 
which has for the time being overshadowed 
the human race. It is a fine piece of self- 
sacrifice, in some senses a greater piece of self- 
sacrifice than the active excitement of the 
self-sacrifice of the combatant officer, and 
it is a living testimony, in the somewhat 
monotonous round of duties borne without 
murmuring, of what consecrated men will do 



A VISIT TO S CAMP 109 

for Christ's sake and for the cause of the King- 
dom of God. It is one thing to be a peripatetic 
evangelist — to travel around from place to 
place, and from area to area, inclusive of both 
England and France — under the kindly super- 
vision of the Young Men's Christian Associa- 
tion; preaching the Gospel to large audiences 
of men who have been gathered together 
through the effectiveness of extensive adver- 
tising; but it is quite another thing, and a far 
harder and more spiritually exhausting process, 
to minister day in and day out, month in and 
month out, and, in some individual cases, year 
in and year out in the same locality, and 
apparently to the same body of men; to ad- 
minister the sacraments to comparatively small 
congregations; to preach at formal parade 
services, where the authoritativeness of the 
proceedings oftentimes militates against the 
receptiveness of the hearers; to visit the sick 
in the hospitals, and to bear testimony by the 
character of one's daily living of the reality of 
the faith which possesses the citadel of person- 
ality. There is all the difference between a 
Rev. William Sunday, who "blows into" a 
community, pulverizing the inhabitants by the 
excellence of a series of startling sermons — for 
every man, even the most insignificant 
preacher, has a limited series of best addresses 
— and the faithful parish priest, who incon- 
spicuously, but with a perpetual "woe is me," 



1 10 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

summers and winters his people, and gives of 
the treasures of his soul for the constructive 
welfare and spiritual education of "the flock 
committed to his care." 

What some of these chaplains have suffered 
— and uncomplainingly — in the homesickness 
and shepherd-illness of enforced separation 
from their loved ones and their congregation 
is known to their secret hearts alone, and to 
the Great Heart of the Master whom they 
serve. It is all a magnificent instance of the 
"motive" which encharges the ministries of all 
the Churches of Christendom, and it argues 
well for the ultimate transformation of the 
kingdoms of this world into the Kingdom of 
our Lord and of His Christ. To these men, 
some of them known to me personally and the 
greater number of them unknown, I tender 
most sincere, even if unsought for praise, and 
humbly bow my head as in the presence of 
men whose "shoe latchets I am not worthy to 
unloose." 

The Y. M. C. A. huts in this area are veri- 
table hives of activity. They seem to be 
thronged with soldiers from noon until night, 
and the service being rendered is, and obviously 
so, as multiform as the needs demand. Every- 
thing is, as it were, dynamic rather than static, 
and avenues of approach to the men are opened 
up even before the opportunity itself appears 
to exist in tangible form. The minds of the 



A VISIT TO S CAMP I'll 

Y. M. C. A. workers are busy day and night in 
formulating schemes of usefulness adapted to 
enlarging or shifting circumstances, and the 
body, mind, and spirit of the individual 
"Tommy" are catered to and nourished from 
every conceivable angle of contact. The detail 
of administration, for the individual hut leader, 
and, above all, for the Supervisor in every area, 
is a surcharging business which occupies to the 
full every available hour of the average day, 
and which calls for the application of the most 
experienced business acumen. 

It is, of course, the "Spiritualities" which 
have occupied my most undivided attention, 
and it is of the Services in the several huts, at 
which I was privileged either to be present or 
to participate, that I would speak. 

The hut at S.. , the best equipped 

Canadian hut in any of the English camps, a 
hut erected by the Canadian Y. M. C. A. in 
memory of a fallen comrade, with a seating 
capacity of some seven hundred men, is filled 
from end to end, many soldiers actually stand- 
ing up along the walls, and at the rear entrance. 
These men, ranging from privates to sergeants 
and with a scattering of officers, are, appar- 
ently, of almost every age — from the beardless 
youth of twenty summers to the serried face 
of the fighting man who has passed the 
boundry marks of middle life. The color 
scheme is prevalently Khaki, with splotches of 



112 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

blue daubed here and there where the invalid 
men are scattered among their companions — 
all caught up into the conglomerate gaudiness 
of the national flags of the Allies hanging in 
festooned simplicity from arching rafters and 
tin slated roof. 

These men, a congregation of men which it 
would be dificult to assemble in similiar num- 
ber in the precincts of any Church at home, 
have all gathered together with the avowed 
purpose of taking part in a religious service, 
and of listening to a religious address. They 
are voluntarily present, and they are saturated 
with a reverent earnestness which is indicative 
of the exercise of their own free will. They 
are far from home and loved ones; they are 
embarked upon the most harrowingly un- 
toward experience which could possibly fall to 
the lot of mortal man; and they have come in 
soul hunger and in soul thirst to hear a simple 
exposition of a Gospel theme which may prove 
to be both food and drink amid the unusual 
temptations which surround them in their 
army life. 

There is a sweetness, and, withal, a sadness 
in the faces of these men which strikes one, and 
unhesitatingly, even at the most cursory 
glance. These men are lonely — all the more 
lonely in that their loneliness must, for man- 
hood's sake, be kept to themselves. These 
men are homesick, with that thrustful quality 



A VISIT TO S CAMP 113 

of homesickness which may only be experi- 
enced by the man who has good reasons to 
believe that he has looked upon his nearest 
and dearest, so far as life on earth is concerned, 
for the last time. These men are filled with 
wonder, and a wonder all shot through with 
an unspeakable horror; for they have, many 
of them, seen such things and heard such 
things during the past few years the existence 
or the enormity of which they could never have 
conceived to be possible in bygone days, and 
they have temporarily returned from a living 
and festering hell, into the maelstrom of which 
they have good reason to believe they must 
shortly go back again. They would under- 
stand what it all means, and yet they find it 
quite impossible to put into words the inter- 
rogation which thumps at the doors of their 
souls. These men are self-conscious men — 
those, at least, who have not up to date had 
their baptism of fire, and they are fearfully 
speculating as to the stuff of which they are 
made. How will flesh and blood behave when 
it is faced with that the very thought of which 
sends a revolting shudder through the shrink- 
ing human frame? Some of these men are pen- 
itent men — a number of them, through sheer 
heartsickness and through spacial separation 
from their restraining environments, have done 
things in the last few months, or weeks, which 
they have never done before, and which have 



114 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

sullied their self-respect to the depths of con- 
scientious despair. All of them are human 
men, subject to all the hopes and longings of 
humanity, with hearts that feel and minds that 
think and souls that dream, sensationfull and 
idealistic, and, joined together in outward 
companionship whilst isolated in innermost 
personality, they bear in eye and feature, in 
fixed and shifting expression, the melancholy 
pilgrim look which is common to all those who 
are consciously, or unconsciously, aware of 
the fact that "here they have no continuing 
city." 

It is a sight to fill the preacher's heart with 
love; with a portion of that compassion 
which overflowed the Master's consciousness 
as He looked upon the multitudes; and he 
whispers an unuttered prayer that he may be 
able to speak a message of penetrative power 
such as will satisfy the dumb and animate 
needs of his heroic brothers to whom he has 
the extraordinary privilege to speak. 

The service begins with a hymn; the men 
either sitting or standing ; then another hymn, 
selected by the men themselves; after that an 
extemporaneous prayer; then a solo by a 
singer, one of many who have given their 
services in such fashion to the enlisted men 
during the war; then another hymn followed 
by the address, and the benediction. The sing- 
ing is full volumed, and fairly lifts the roof; 



A VISIT TO S. .... . CAMP 115 

the men rejoicing in all the well-known tunes, 
feeling their association with the Church life 
of former days ; the solo is greeted with vocifer- 
ous applause; the prayer is carried through 
amid intense stillness, and with bowed heads ; 
and the address is listened to with such eager 
intentness that the hundreds of men, so far 
as all movement is concerned, might be one 
man, and that man a graven image chained to 
his chair. 

At the end of the service proper, and just 
prior to the benediction — although the practice 
is varied by circumstances and atmosphere — 
the men are called upon to make a decision to 
lead the Christ life, or to renew a similar de- 
cision made at some previous time, and for 
this purpose cards, with the following in- 
dentitures, are handed by the willing ushers 
from row to row of seated men: "I hereby 
express the desire to become a follower of the 
Lord Jesus Christ and to become more closely 
identified with the work of the Christian 
Church." Below this heading there are spaces 
for the regimental number, and for the Church 
denomination. The men are requested to 
sign their names, and to give the address or 
addresses of relatives or friends in Canada to 
whom they would like a form letter sent advis- 
ing the interested parties of the decision which 
they have made. The letter, forwarded im- 
mediately to the interested chaplains of the 



116 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

area and to the people whose names have been 
indicated, is stereotyped, and couched in the 
ensuing terms : 
"Dear Friend : 

"You will be interested to know that 

has attended the religious services conducted 

by Rev , and has signed one of the 

decision cards. 

"This voluntary act on his part will indicate 
one of two things ; either that he has decided 
to become a follower of Christ, or, having 
already made that decision, he has expressed 
a desire to take a forward step in the service 
of Christ's Kingdom. 

"Permit me to assure you that we shall join 
our prayers with yours that strength may be 
given him to live out in his life the resolution 
he has made. I would also add that this letter 
is sent at his own request. 

"Yours in Christian Service, 



"Captain, Canadian Y. M. C. A." 

It has been proved by experience that in the 
course of an ordinary year these letters have 
reached countless homes in Canada, and that 
the comfort to the recipients, specially in cases 
where the loved one has died on the field of 
battle, has been altogether unmeasurable in 
words of human speech. 

One night I journeyed to another of the 
camps in S area — West Sandling, not 



A VISIT TO S CAMP 117 

for evangelistic purposes, but to deliver a 
lecture on the subject America and the War. 
The hut conditions were similar ; but with this 
difference — the sing song was purely secular in 
character, and the atmosphere was redolent 
with tobacco smoke. Through the lurking 
haze I could discern hundreds of men, sitting, 
lolling, and standing from platform to canteen 
department. All were, of course, in uniform, 
but there was an abandon of discipline, for the 
men were enjoying their well-earned evening 
rest, which expressed itself in ringing laughter, 
and audible good fellowship. 

When my turn came to deliver my speech I 
was announced as a citizen of Cleveland, Ohio, 
and, with the exceptional courtesy for which 
the Canadian soldier is justly famed, I received 
a rousing ovation. This cordiality of response 
was continued throughout the lecture, getting 
altogether out of bounds when the name of 
President Wilson was mentioned, or when the 
enthusiastic participation of the American 
nation in the war was affirmed, and I was 
conscious of the fact that American interven- 
tion means much to the Allied soldier who has 
been fighting the hard fought battles of the ear- 
lier stages of the War. It suggests succor to 
the beleagured, and bespeaks a speedy termina- 
tion to a conflict in which the veteran is alto- 
gether "fed up." Moreover, and I was glad to 
notice this fact, the Canadian does not seem to 



118 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

be suffering under the impression that the 
United States should have declared war against 
Germany before she actually did, and he is 
convinced of the fact that the American ex- 
ecutive threw in his lot with Great Britain, 
France, and the rest, at the earliest possible 
moment — when American opinion was crystal- 
ized, and wholesale unanimity of sentiment 
reasonably assured. 

The applause and cheering which greeted 
me at the conclusion of the address — a feeble 
attempt to cover an almost endless subject in 
a limited space of time — were far from being 
personal; they were expressive of the good 
feeling which the Canadian soldier has for his 
brother-in-arms, and of thanksgiving that the 
greatest of all Republics has determined to do 
her part in ridding the world and civilization 
of a menace which threatens to standardize the 
one and destroy the other, until liberty, 
fraternity, and equality perish from off the 
earth. 

One may only hope that the Americans and 
Canadians, the inhabitants of the same Con- 
tinent, may be thrown closely together on the 
battle fronts of Europe, for they understand 
and appreciate one another as few of the armies- 
associated together in the Allied cause. 



A VISIT TO W CAMP 

EARLY in the month of October, 1917, I 
was detailed to visit W Camp, the 

home of the Fifth Canadian Division. I 
reached Godalming, Surrey, after an hour's 
ride from London, and was met at the station 
by a representative of the Canadian Y M. C. A. 

Taking a taxi we arrived at W , a distance 

of some three miles, at the sunset hour when 
the community of far-stretching huts, clustered 
around and on the summit of a well-defined hill, 
were bathed in the glowing embers of the dying 
day. It was a sight indigenous to the fact of 
war, and aroused many feelings in the heart of 
a man who, thousands of miles away from 
home, realized that he was in the midst of an 
armed encampment of his fellow-countrymen. 
It is a difficult matter to describe the 
topography of an English training camp to 
anybody who has never been privileged to 
come within sighting distance of the same; 
but in order that my readers may achieve the 
atmosphere of one of these extemporized 
cities so far scattered throughout Europe and 



120 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

America to-day, I would attempt a brief 
description. 

W. . . . Camp, more or less typical of similar 
camps throughout England, is the temporary 
abiding place of some twenty thousand Cana- 
dian troops. It is situated, as suggested above, 
on high ground amid the rolling dunes of the 
far-famed County of Surrey, and, crowned with 
pine trees, lies on the direct road between 
London and Portsmouth ; an ideal location in 
every way — from a military point of view, and 
in regard to the valued healthfulness of its in- 
habitants. The camp is composed of seem- 
ingly miles upon miles of primitive appearing 
huts, arranged in streets and blocks, with in- 
tersecting open spaces which mark the division 
of the various Units and which serve at the 
same time for parade grounds and practising 
areas for the troops. It looks for all the world 
like the pictures which one sees of mining 
towns in the western states, where the neces- 
sities of men in community life have naturally 
outrun the luxuries of either architectural 
stability or ordered beauty. It is saturated 
with the soul deadening monotony of buildings 
erected en bloc and devoid of individualistic 
appeal to the eye. Apart from differentiating 
numbers and printed sign boards it would 
be altogether impossible for; the stranger to 
distinguish one street from another street, or 
one structure from its neighboring structure. 



A VISIT TOW CAMP 121 

There is a lack of mosaic and a prevalence of 
clean cut pattern which is so closely related to 
efficiency as to be thoroughly divorced from all 
semblance of artistic display. One feels that 
one is walking through a cemetery of the living, 
where every tombstone is like its fellow in ut- 
most detail, and that one must avoid the sacri- 
lege of expecting, in scenery at least, more than 
the circumstances legitimately permit ! 

The Canadians in W. . . .have been living in 

W for more than a year, under the most 

stringent military discipline — men, young and 
middle-aged, drawn from the liberty-loving 
civilian class of population — and, as may well 
be imagined, the men are tired to death of their 
surroundings, of their prolonged training, and 
are craving for the privileged opportunity of 
experience at the front. When one thinks of 
thousands of heart whole men, many of them 
husbands and fathers, who have been away 
from their families for a considerable length of 
time, irrevocably separated from their respect- 
ive callings and "cooped up" in the boundaries 
of a restricted plot of ground, one begins 
to get some idea of the autocracy of war, 
whether it be waged by democratic or un- 
democratic nations. One also appreciates the 
extraordinary endurance of untoward condi- 
tion which soldiers exhibit in the performance 
of their bounden patriotic duty! Homesick 
and bored to extinction, hungry, with a soul 



122 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

compelling appetite, for the old scenes and the 
familiar faces, and perforated with keen-edged 
anxiety as to the assurance of their ultimate 
return to their native land, men are "playing 
the game" with obvious cheerfulness and un- 
flinching determination. Surely human nature 
is a marvellous affair, and worthy of the most 
ecstatic encomiums of the psychologically 
unprejudiced ! 

My chief interest in W lay, of course, 

in the work of the Canadian Y. M. C. A. I 
had come to the Camp with the intention 
of learning as much as possible about the 
manner in which the organization was catering 
to the well-being, physical, social, intellectual, 
and spiritual, of its military constituency, and 
my enquiries immediately on arrival were 
directed toward that end. 

I was quartered at one of the five Y. M. C. A. 
Huts in the Camp — a long building somewhat 
resembling a skating rink in the small Canadian 
town — and through the courtesy of Y. M. C. A. 
officials was quickly given an opportunity to 
see the work in progress — and at first hand. 

The work at W is — at the present time, 

although the same experiment is being tried 

at S and other Camps — unique in its 

educational activities. With a view to pre- 
paring soldiers for better citizenship in Canada 
when they return at the conclusion of the 
war, and also to give them every opportunity 



A VISIT TOW CAMP 123 

and facility for improving their minds, the 
Y. M. C. A. have organized a definite course 
of study— the widespread popularity of which 
has been beyond the fondest dreams of the pro- 
moters. The movement, for movement it is, 
and calculated to become all embracing in its 
SCO pe_arose out of vocational groups that had 
been organized in the Y. M. C. A. Huts during 
the summer of 1917 for the education of the 
men and for the occupying of their leisure time. 
The original study group was a student organ- 
ization, meeting together for discussion, and 
the majority of the members have become 
teachers in the classes now being held. 

At the opportune moment in the develop- 
ment of this undertaking Dr. Tory, President 
of Alberta University, arrived on a special 
mission of investigating the possibilities of 
educational work among the men. Under his 
guidance and inspiration special courses of 
study were arranged for those soldiers who 
were planning to go to a university, a business 
college, or an agricultural institution on their 
return to Canada. 

Three courses of study have, at the time of 
writing, been adopted: literary, business, and 
agricultural. The students are duly registered, 
as in any home institute ; the roll is called at 
the beginning of every class; text books are 
prescribed; and examinations are duly held, 



124 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

looking towards the attainment of a high 
standard of excellence. 

The military authorities have most gener- 
ously placed their Instructional Huts at the 
disposal of the Y. M. C. A., and have gone so 
far as to allot an additional building for the 
purposes of a library and students' room. The 
attendance has steadily increased from the 
inauguration of the classes, and the interest 
awakened has involved a total membership of 
more than two thousand soldiers. 

The courses of study comprise, under the 
head of Literary, classes in English, History, 
Latin, Greek, French, and Mathematics ; under 
the head of Business, Shorthand and Book- 
keeping; and under the head of Agriculture, 
Animal Husbandry, Farm Bookkeeping, and 
Law relating to negotiable papers. 

I had the good fortune of attending the 
classes in session one evening, and in rotation, 
even going so far as to act as registrar in the 
agricultural department. I found hundreds of 
soldiers, amongst their number many college 
undergraduates and graduates, collected in 
the various huts, and listening most attentively 
to illuminating lectures being delivered by 
the staff of commissioned and non-com- 
missioned instructors. There was a collegiate 
atmosphere in the whole performance, and 
with this unconventional difference — the men 
were obviously in earnest and were present of 



A VISIT TOW...... CAMP 125 

their own free-willed enthusiasm; not because 
their parents or guardians had seen fit to give 
them a college education! 

When one realizes that throughout the 
"drag" of war the soldiers of Canada, the sol- 
diers, at any rate, in English camps, will have 
the opportunity of keeping their minds in work- 
ing order, and that the time and efficiency 
which they manifest in these classes will be 
linked up with university requirements in the 
home land, one has some faint idea of the value 
of this new and, until recently, untried work 
being carried on, in the usual self-sacrificing 
spirit, by the Canadian Y. M. C. A. The 
possibilities are altogether untold; the effect 
upon the morale of the soldier alone is incom- 
putable; and the movement may well be em- 
ulated by the armies of our allies which, in this 
long drawn out campaign of hostilities, are in 
a fair way of losing their civil initiative through 
long desuetude. 

sjc 4; if. j*s ;Js s|e 

Has the reader ever slept in a Y. M. C. A. 
Hut on a cold autumnal night in England? If 
not, he has an experience ahead of him which 
he may conscientiously determine, for his 
health's and comfort's sake, to avoid ! I have 
slept in a Y. M. C. A. Hut on a damply frigid 
English night, and, unless unkind fate pre- 
scribes a repetition of the misfortune, I shall 



126 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

never duplicate the agony. For agony it was ! 
Sheetless, but blanketfull, I lay down to rest 
in a wooden shack, for, as a matter of fact, the 
average hut is neither more nor less than a 
shack, through which in well-defined spots one 
could feel the sweeping winds of evening, and, 
if one were possessed of astronomical pro- 
clivites, count the stars, telling them all by 
name ! I lay down to rest, but, as events 
proved, not to sleep! Coldness, a blood- 
curdling coldness, a coldness which literally 
wrapped the entire body in a swathing chill of 
death, settled down upon me, and from head to 
foot, as well as through and through. The 
temperature had suddenly gone down to freez- 
ing point, and tenderfoot that I was, I was all 
unprepared, physically and materially, for the 
unexpected variation. I cuddled myself to 
myself, and, staring-eyed, wondered how I 
might best retain some semblance of circulation 
until the dawn of morning's light ! The next 
day my companions in the neighboring com- 
partments assured me that they had passed a 
blissful night, and, far from sympathizing with 
my predicament, chided me upon the softness 
and the preponderance of my sensitive flesh — 
going so far as to suggest that I was a fit 
subject for the rigors of a winter in France! 
There are times when even Christian men seem 
to fall short of one's preconceived conception 
of requisite tender-heartedness ! 



A VISIT TOW CAMP 127 

Among the other remarkably serviceable 
activities of the Y. M. C. A. I discovered the 
following — symptomatic of the range of work 
being prosecuted by the same organization in 
all the English military camps. 

In each of the Huts certain nights of the 
week are set aside for letter writing. An effort 
is made by the officers in charge to keep the 
men persistently reminded of the importance 
of regular communication with their relatives 
and friends at home. The average daily mail 

from each of the five huts at W is close to 

the five hundred mark. This is, as any anxious 
parent or wife realizes only too well, an organ- 
ized effort which in the aggregate means much 
to countless thousands of people. It has, since 
the outbreak of the war, been one of the pro- 
nounced endeavors of the Y. M. C. A. of all 
countries. 

In the line of athletics the Y. M. C. A. officers 
reported games of baseball, lacrosse, football, 
basketball, hikes, quoit tournaments, etc., and 
the records went to show that they had 
furnished the men with a considerable amount 
of sporting equipment, including balls and bats 
of all description. During my short stay in 

W the championship game in a baseball 

series, and a gymnkhana of alarming propor- 
tions, were "in the air", and scheduled for an 
imminent date. 

Add to all the foregoing ministrations to 



128 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

the soldiers the splendid concerts which are 
held frequently, when the very best artists are 
pressed into service, and the indispensable work 
which is being expressed in the daily canteen, 
where the enlisted men literally congregate in 
mobs, and you have some conception of what 
the Y. M. C. A., whether English or Canadian 
or American, means to the soldier in this pres- 
ent war. It is not merely the letter of the thing 
that counts — it is, preeminently, the personal 
touch of the Y. M. C. A. worker; than whom 
there is no more self-sacrificing man in the 
ranks of the combatant armies to-day. 



A VISIT TO A CAMP 

THE last Canadian camp which I visited in 
England — and my impressions concerning 
it are somewhat vague, in that my outlook was 
obsessed with the predominant coloring of 

conscious ill health — was A , on the south 

coast, and not far from the well-known city of 
B 

On arrival at A I went immediately, 

my luggage being carried upon the shoulders 
of a valiant, although impecunious, small boy, 
to the Esplanade Hotel; a comfortable hostel 
beautifully situated on the verge of the sand 
dunes, and suffocated with the reverberating 
music of the thundering ocean. Here I spent a 
lonely evening, so far as direct conversational 
companionship was concerned, and in the midst 
of hundreds of my former, countrymen. 

Canadian officers, the majority of them ap- 
parently on temporary leave from the Western 
Front, literally thronged the corridors of the 
hotel, and filled all available space before the 
brightly blazing fire places. Many of the 
officers, as I could readily gather from their 



130 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

remarks, had been away from Canada for a 
year, for two years, and for even longer time, 
and had been fortunate enough to see active 
service on the Somme, at Ypres, and elsewhere. 
A splendid set of men they were, physically fit, 
and with that inexpressible look of endurance, 
endurance both of body and of soul, which 
comes of experience in the trenches. They 
spoke of battles fought and won; of comrades 
killed in this "Push" and in that — "gone west," 
as they phrased it in their picturesque vocab- 
ulary ; but chiefly they reminisced of incidents 
which had occurred in the homeland in days of 
peace, and of loved ones whom they had not 
seen since war farewells of long ago. 

It was a typical gathering, a gathering to be 
met with under similar surroundings in almost 
every coastal town in England in wartime, and 
somehow or other, it pressed home the nobility 
and the heinousness of war to a degree and an 
extent almost overwhelming to the imagina- 
tion Here were men, men of parts, irrevo- 
cably cut off, for an appreciable period of time, 
from their families, from their businesses, from 
their useful and influential standings in their 
own localities, from all the deeps of life which 
forever call to the corresponding deeps, and — 
for what? To live monotonously (and would 
that someone would write befittingly upon the 
monotonies of army life), in hutted encamp- 
ments, in disagreeable ditches where, like as 



A VISIT TO A CAMP 131 

not, the water is waist rather than ankle deep, 
and in broken down, shell-shattered barns 
where the scientifically inclined may study 
astronomy through the roof as well as geology 
through the floor. For what ? To be divorced 
indefinitely from all that life holds dear — 
love, ambition, the society of children, the 
obligations of career, in order to murder their 
fellow-men with gunshot or bayonet thrust for 
democracy's dear sake ! I felt the beastliness 

of the war that evening in A as, perhaps, 

I had never felt it before. A pathological 
nausea it may have been, and yet, in moments 
of health and sanity, how much there is to 
make us loathe the absurdity, the asininity, the 
pathetic infutility, the unproductive heinous- 
ness, of war. When all is said and done it is an 
infantile pastime for full-grown men. 

As I sat that evening in A , alone in the 

midst of company, and what a lonely loneliness 
is the loneliness of a crowd, I heard a story, 
a story suggestive of the callousness of the 
human heart, which I shall never forget, and 
which, although it is irrelevant to the motive of 
these pages, I shall pass on to my readers to 
think of, in all its inferences, as they will. 

Two officers were sitting near me — one 
evidently a born Canadian, the other, as his 
words soon proved, a Welshman who had lived 
in Canada for several years, and who, on the 
outbreak of war, had received a commission in 



132 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

the First Canadian Contingent, and gone over- 
seas as a loyal citizen of his adopted country. 
It was the erstwhile Welshman who told the 
story, the intimate story of his life, and who, 
apparently, heeded not the presence of the 
seedy looking stranger huddled up beside the 
blazing fire seeking that meed of warmth which 
should be generated internally within one's 
accomodating veins. 

"You know, Dick," for so the one man spoke 
to the other man, his friend ; "you know, Dick, 

I was born at in Wales. I grew up in a 

family circle of three, my mother, my brother, 
and myself. We lived in a small home in a hill- 
locked village, and although our means were 
small and my education was achieved in the 
somewhat limited atmosphere of the neighbor- 
ing board school I was as happy and self re- 
spectful as any irresponsible youngster well 
might be. I accepted my lot without question- 
ing, joining in all the innocent pleasures of my 
play-fellows, and grew toward maturity with- 
out the semblance of a shadow over the sunlit 
panorama of my destiny. It was good to be 
alive in that state of things unto which it had 
pleased God to call me, and the commonplace 
days succeeded one another even into the vista 
of the years without a conscious break in the 
uniformity of their sufficient happiness. 

"On the sudden, however, everything was 
changed, and an element of tragedy entered 



A VISIT TO A CAMP 133 

into my experience, never again to be dissipated 
so long as life might last. My mother took me 
aside, when I had reached my twenty-first 
year, and told me that she was not my mother 
—that I was the illegitimate child of her only 
sister, and that my supposed brother, the com- 
rade and close companion of my youth, was my 
illegal cousin. She said that she thought I 
ought to understand these things, that the 
knowledge of the truth would prevent un- 
pleasant complications in the future, and that 
she told me at this time as she judged me to 
be old enough to endure such disillusionment 
without inimical effect to my moral character. 
"You may imagine my feelings ! My Temple 
of Life was laid in ruins at my feet ; my affec- 
tions were smitten in their most vulnerable in- 
timacies; and I was new born to a stigma 
which to my sensitive imagination seemed to 
brand me as a Cain among my fellows. 

"The upshot of the revelation was that I left 
home, and journeyed overseas to try my 
fortune in the new world. I settled in Western 
Canada, and by slow stages, meeting many 
seemingly insurmountable obstacles and over- 
coming them one by one, made my way to a 
fair competence, and an honored name. Over 
those years I must draw a veil. They are years 
tinged with an inward struggle which has left 
its marks upon my face, and which, for the sake 
of life's equanimity, I would not voluntarily 



134 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

recall. The tendency and the recurrent temp- 
tation of a man so circumstanced is to feel that 
he has been handicapped from birth, that fate 
has played him a sorry trick, that God is an 
unfair God, and that he should seek nirvana in 
unholy dissipation. From such a course I was 
saved by a deeply religious training, and an 
ingrained love for the services of the Christian 
Church. 

"The worst, however, was still to come. 
After I had been in Canada for some years, and 
was so circumstanced that I could afford the 
expenses of a journey home, I went back to 
Wales, to the memory packed village of my 
boyhood days, and looked up the woman who 
had been to me as a mother, and my 'cousin 
brother'. From them, after reiterated interro- 
gation — for I was determined to learn the truth 
— I discovered that my real mother was dead, 
and that my natural father was an influential 
resident of a community not many miles away. 
To the neighboring city I went, resolved to 
meet my father face to face and to discover 
whether or no there were mitigating circum- 
stances which would atone his offence in my 
eyes, and purge the stain which I had ever felt 
must be running through the channels of my 
own life's blood. 

"Through the telephone, and with much 
difficulty — for he was a man of affairs in truth 
— I made an appointment with my father to 



A VISIT TO A CAMP 135 

meet him in his office. I arrived on time, and 
with trembling limbs and suffocating heart — 
for it is an experience to meet one's father for 
the first time in middle life, and such a father, 
I was ushered into the presence of the man who 
had brought me into being as a labelled bastard 
for as long a time as life should last. 

"A man rose from a desk — a desk heaped 
high with correspondence and papers of all 
sorts — and said, 'Well, sir, who are you, and 
what may I do for you ?' I replied, ' I am your 
son/ 

"Do you suppose that the man was overcome 
with emotion — flabbergasted — nonplussed? 
Not at all, and not for the fraction of a mo- 
ment; without the slightest tremor of voice, 
without so much as a moistening of the lips, 
he immediately asked in an even tone, 'Oh, is 
that so? Which one are you? Who was your 
mother?' 

"I could not speak. There was nothing to be 
said. Had there been volumes to utter — 
volumes which such a monster-man might have 
understood — I could never have uttered them. 
Something arose within me that strangled my 
articulation; that caused my heart to thump 
against my ribs; that blinded my eyes, and 
made the room to swirl about me as a living 
thing. Murder, frenzy, an overpowering lust 
of destruction, gripped me as in giant's em- 
brace, and, keeping my thread of sanity amid 



136 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

the skein of insanity which entangled me, I 
tottered shufflingly from the room. 

" 'Which one are you ; who was your 
mother?' I tell you, Dick, the words were 
literally burned into my brain; they forever 
sear my conscience as with red hot iron ; they 
soil my soul as with the smoking fumes of hell ; 
and I shall never be at rest until Bosche's shell, 
delayed these twice twelve months, blots out 
my earth-born curse, and gives me entrance 
into that land where, in God's denned and ap- 
proachable Presence, 'a man's a man for a* 
that/ " 

What do you think of the story, gentle 
readers? Is it not calculated to make the most 
unthinking think, and to open the floodgates 
of resistive remorse in the stony heart of the 
most case hardened, habit ironed, sensualist? 

All through that livelong night, for it proved 
to be one of the longest lived nights of my life, 
the story banished sleep from my eyes. I kept 
on repeating over and over again, to the verge 
of insanity, the wages of sin is death — death — 
blackest death. And so they forever are ; either 
for the sinner, or for the sinned against, or 
both. 

The next morning the Supervisor of the 

Y. M. C. A. for the A area called for me 

at an early hour, and took me out to the 
Garrison church, to preach at the Church of 
England parade service. 



A VISIT TO A CAMP 137 

All along the line of route we passed detach- 
ment after detachment of soldiers bound for 
their respective places of worship — spick and 
span in their furbished accoutrements. The 
Lord's Day in an English military camp is, 
for the morning hours at least, a busy day, and 
streets are filled with swinging companies of 
troops; whilst a veritable babel of conflicting 
sounds ascend from the numerous bands, 
echoing and re-echoing in din of chorus from 
iron hut and neighboring hillside. 

A is, I think acknowledgedly so, the 

most picturesque Canadian camp in England. 
There is a finished and proportionated appear- 
ance about the buildings ; a paved and finished 
look about the sectoring streets; and, above 
all, a grouping of verdure-clad hills around and 
about and running down to the shimmering sea, 
which are not duplicated in W. . . ., or S. . . . 

— beautifully situated as W and S 

undoubtedly are — and which, so I have been 
informed, find unequal parallel in either B . . . . 
or C 

Has the reader ever been present at a parade 
service? If not, then, it is in my opinion an 
experience to be sought, and, when attained, to 
be forgotten. There is a compulsory note 
about a parade service which is apt to endanger 
the spirit of true religion. The men are there, 
many of them, simply because they have to be 
there. It is a business ordained by the powers 



138 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

that be, and so there is little, if any, atmosphere 
of privileged pleasure in the whole perform- 
ance. Moreover ; brevity is the soul of a parade 
service. From beginning to end, throughout 
prayers, scripture reading, hymn singing, and 
address, everything is "run off" with a military 
precision which murders artistic effect with the 
stiletto of prescribed efficiency. One feels that 
the General, or, perchance, the Colonel, is "on 
deck" ; but one is not quite so sure, so palpably 
sure, of the agreeably wooed Presence of God 
— the Generalissimo in whose Name the ranks 
are, nominally at any rate, mustered for 
worship. 

At A , in the Garrison church — so it 

seemed to the writer, and, of course, he may be 
wrong — the responses of the congregation 
lacked that whole-souled spontaneity and 
enthusiasm, and the hymns fell short of that 
thunderous upheaval of sound, which might 
have been expected in a handled gathering of 
some eight hundred men, and which one was 
accustomed to experience in the voluntary 
assemblies of men at the religious services in 
the Y. M. C. A. Huts. The preacher was 
conscious of having to make an unusual effort 
to grip the attention of his hearers, and to im- 
press them with the fact that he was in living 
earnest, sent to preach to them by "the Captain 
of our Salvation," rather than by the camp 
commandant. It must be said, however, that 



A VISIT TO A CAMP 139 

when the effort had been made, and that when 
the crispness of the service had rediscovered 
itself in the assumed crispness of the preacher's 
utterance, the opportunity was obviously 
matched by the apparent response of the 
ordered listeners. It was "good to be there," 
and God Himself was in "the midst". 

In A , as in all other camps, the chap- 
lains are accomplishing a painstaking and re- 
sultful work. Their lives must be, from a 
worldly point of view, monotonous to a degree ; 
but they show no signs of spiritual fatigue, and, 
undaunted, far from home, separated from the 
environment which means mecca to them, they 
perform punctiliously their specified and un- 
specified duties — in hut, in hospital, in church, 
and in personal contact with the men — as true 
soldiers of Jesus Christ ; as men of God, with- 
out fear, and without reproach. 



A VISIT TO OXFORD 

TO walk in the City of the Dead must be an 
exhilarating experience as compared with 
the feelings of an old-time Oxford man who 
revisits the scenes of his student days in this 
Year of Hate, 191 7. All that made Oxford 
Oxonian — apart, of course, from its architect- 
ural uniqueness — has temporarily departed. 
Scholasticism, in its somewhat indefinable, but 
patent, atmosphere, has given place to a mar- 
tial obtrusiveness altogether out of harmony 
with its environment. 

Instead of the undergraduate swinging along 
"the High," or the student returning in athletic 
raiment from his daily exercise, the swanking 
soldier meets the eye at every turn — in the 
parks, along the river banks, and in the far- 
famed "quads." The lean-faced and ascetic 
looking don — for the non-port drinking don is 
the most cadaverous of men — has given way to 
the ruddy cheeked officer, whose wholesome- 
ness of body leaves the lining of his mind an 
open question. The gown and mortar board 
are exchanged for the khaki tunic and the 



A VISIT TO OXFORD 141 

swagger stick, whilst the ubiquitous cleric 
is swallowed up in the blue-clad returned 
"Tommy," who having suffered upon the fields 
of France, and elsewhere, for his country's in- 
tegrity is now convalescing in obvious comfort 
within the walls of England's greatest seat of 
learning 

Just think of it! Two hundred and fifty 
undergraduates in residence where before the 
War the number ranged at the three thousand 
mark, and over — and the younger professorial 
body to a man either at the Front, or dead upon 
the field of battle ! It is a living witness, or, in 
another sense, a dead testimony, to the inroads 
made upon the youth of England and her 
Dominions since the ill-fated month of August, 
four years ago, when blood-lit hellishness was 
let loose among the nations of the earth, and 
Mars, gory Mars, came into its guilty own. 

Imagine the disorganization, a disorganiza- 
tion which it will obviously take many years to 
overtake ; picture the depletion in constituency, 
a depletion which in substance shall never be 
redeemed; then, regarding all this as sympto- 
matic of the havoc of life and opportunity 
wrought at large and in wholesale fashion, 
curse in a Christian sort of way, but in the 
Name of God, the Prussian system which has 
upset the equilibrium of the universe. "It must 
needs be that offences come; but woe to that 
man, or nation, by whom they come/' In a 



142 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

very real sense — "it were better for that nation 
had it never been born." 



I set out one morning to see Oxford as I 
remembered it, and, apart from the fact that the 
streets ran in the same direction as of yore, and 
that the well-worn buildings were still intact, 
Oxford as I remembered it was dead. The 
body remained but the soul had taken its flight. 

I had walked only a few blocks when a regi- 
ment of soldiers came marching by — a mag- 
nificent body of men, with ringing step and 
thrustful arm swing; but altogether unaca- 
demic in their appearance. I traced the martial 
host to its lair, and lo! it was quartered in 
Keble College — at ordinary times the haven of 
aspiring candidates for Holy Orders. I crossed 
the street, and was almost annihilated by a fast 
speeding military automobile, driven by a 
chauffeur in regulation blouse and bloomers! 
I turned into the neighboring parks, and be- 
hold! a grand review — hundreds of soldiers 
going through manoeuvres under a cantanker- 
ous colonel who made short and staccato work 
of the third commandment ; and with their fixed 
bayonets flashing in the autumn sunlight. I 
wended my way to Magdalen College, and dis- 
covered that I had inadvertently run into a 
barracks for flying corps ! I walked to Christ 
Church, aristocratic Christ Church, and "Tom 
Quad" was spotted all over with commissioned 



A VISIT TO OXFORD 143 

and non-commissioned men, unceremoniously 
smoking the inevitable and ubiquitous cigarette 
amid the pastures of the self-consciously elite I 
Along the "Tow Path" I strolled in saddened 
meditation, feeling like a modern Rip Van 
Winkle, only to be awakened by a blasphemous 
sound to which I grew accustomed in the next 
few hours, coming to regard it as one of the 
characteristic sounds of Oxford — the whirring 
of aeroplanes ! Surely an incarnate sacrilege in 
the haunts of eight weeks' ghosts of former 
years ! 

For comfort and refreshing conversation, 
whistling as a boy in a cemetery at night to 
keep my courage up, I called upon my small 
circle of acquaintances among the younger pro- 
fessors and fellows whom I once had known. 
Not one of them did I find at home. Either 
"at the Front, sir," or "dead," was the reply I 
received in every case. It was harrowing, and 
disillusioning, and thought-provocative to a 
degree. I was driven in silently upon myself, 
and, in a human sense, "my soul was exceed- 
ingly sorrowful, even unto death." 

But, what a joy-shot mourning it proved to 
be on second thought ! Was not this, although 
a vastly and intensely different Oxford to any 
Oxford that one had even known, Oxford at its 
best? Was it not Oxford "on the heights" — 
Oxford touched with the Breath of God, and in 
a fulness of measure unequalled in all the 



144 THE RELIGION OF THE TOMMY 

momentous ages of its hoary past? Was it not 
Oxford dying in order that England and Civili- 
zation might live, and self-willingly deceased 
in order that a greater Oxford might rise again 
from the dead ? Was it not the availing process 
which must ever be gone through with before 
there may be a most glorious resurrection? 
Was it not an institution of learning put to the 
test and not found wanting? Was it not by 
such a thing as this that a university justified 
its right to exist — to pour from its walls the 
youth of the nation when the service and the 
salvation of the nation called ? 

Verily — Oxford has lived for this very hour, 
and her classic halls, to him who has eyes to 
see, and ears to hear, are filled with the sights 
and sounds of countless holy ones who, "having 
washed their robes and made them white in the 
Blood of the Lamb", now throng her quad- 
rangles, her stone-chipped stairways, and her 
verdant meadows with ringing laughter and 
victor's songs "Greater love hath no man than 
this, that a man lay down his life for his 
friend." From such a sowing there cometh 
forth eventually a mighty reaping, and "the 
fields are already white unto harvest." 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper proces 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: j|jm 2001 

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